Azure

Impact Statement:Starting at 09:12 UTC on 10 September 2025, customers using Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets in the East US 2 region may experience errors when performing operations such as create, delete, update, scale, start, or stop. Other services that rely on these resources—including Azure Synapse, Backup, Data Factory, AKS, and Azure Databricks—may also be affected.Current Status:We detected the issue through automated monitoring following a spike in failure rates. We have identified a performance issue in a core infrastructure component responsible for managing resource placement. This is causing delays and failures in virtual machine provisioning. The issue stems from severe transaction delays and high system load in two zones of the region.Active Recovery Efforts:Zone 2 (Az02) - We have re-enabled traffic (100%) to Zone 2.Zone 3 (Az03) and Zone 1 (Az01) – With traffic fully enabled for Zone 2, customers should see operation success increasing in all zones.While all zones are recovered and traffic re-enabled, we are monitoring operation success trends to verify recovery or additional actions needed.The next update will be provided within 60 minutes, or sooner if significant progress is made.

Starting at 05:45 UTC on 06 September 2025, network traffic traversing through the Middle East may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea. Network traffic continues to not be interrupted as Microsoft has rerouted traffic through alternate network paths. We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East until the undersea fiber cuts are fully addressed. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted. We will not have a complete return to typical latencies through the Middle East in the near term, as this is the expected state until repairs can be made in the Red Sea over the coming weeks. Our engineers continue to work in parallel on other methods to optimize latency. With several days of stable operations now, we will remove this awareness banner from the Azure Status page on 10 September 2025 and continue further communications via Azure Service Health.

Starting at 05:45 UTC on 06 September 2025, network traffic traversing through the Middle East may experience increased latency due to undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea. Network traffic continues to not be interrupted as Microsoft has rerouted traffic through alternate network paths. We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East until the undersea fiber cuts are fully addressed. Network traffic that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted. We will not have a complete return to typical latencies through the Middle East in the near term, as this is the expected state until repairs can be made in the Red Sea over the coming weeks. Our engineers continue to work in parallel on other methods to optimize latency. With several days of stable operations now, we will remove this awareness banner from the Azure Status page on 10 September 2025 and continue further communications via Azure Service Health.

Impact SummaryStarting at 05:45 UTC on 06 September 2025, traffic traversing through the Middle East originating and/or terminating in Asia or Europe regions may experience increased latency due to multiple undersea fiber cuts in the Red Sea. The disruption has required rerouting through alternate paths which may lead to higher-than-normal latencies.This advisory is intended to raise awareness ahead of increased demand as the regions enter the start of its work week.Current StatusMultiple international subsea cables were cut in the Red Sea. Our engineering teams are actively managing the interruption via diverse capacity and traffic rerouting, while also discussing alternate capacity options and providers in the region.Undersea fiber cuts can take time to repair, as such we will continuously monitor, rebalance, and optimize routing to reduce customer impact in the meantime. We’ll continue to provide daily updates, or sooner if conditions change.