Quick Summary

If Azure goes down, follow this sequence:

1. Check Azure Status and Service Health.
2. Validate that it’s not an internal configuration issue.
3. Run CLI health checks.
4. Confirm region-wide impact.
5. Trigger failover or temporary routing changes.
6. Use static/read-only modes if needed.
7. Run smoke tests before restoring traffic.
8. File support tickets and check SLA credits.
9. Document the incident and improve the architecture.

Introduction

When Azure goes down, the impact can feel immediate and overwhelming. Applications slow, services fail, and users start reporting issues within minutes. In these situations, teams don’t need theory; they need clear, practical steps to confirm the outage, protect their workloads, and minimize downtime.

This guide gives you a straightforward, step-by-step playbook to follow the moment Azure becomes unavailable. It helps you confirm whether the issue is global or internal, apply temporary fixes, shift traffic to healthy regions, and safely recover once Microsoft resolves the incident.

What to Do When Azure Is Down

Let’s get into the sequence you must follow.

0–5 Minutes: Confirm Whether Azure Is Actually Down

The first few minutes are all about separating assumptions from facts. You need to know quickly if the problem is on Microsoft’s side or within your environment.

1. Check the Official Azure Status Page

Head to Azure’s global service status page.
Here you’ll see real-time updates for outages impacting compute, storage, networking, identity, or region-wide operations.
If there’s a highlighted incident, you likely have your answer.

2. Check Azure Service Health in the Portal

Open the Azure Portal and go to Service Health.
It gives subscription-level insights, meaning you see only the issues that affect your resources.
When Microsoft posts an advisory or service interruption, it appears here instantly.

3. Verify Through External Monitoring Tools

If you use Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, LogicMonitor, or similar tools, check for:

• sudden latency spikes
• 5xx errors
• throttling
• unusual traffic patterns

4. Validate Internally to Rule Out Local Issues

Sometimes the problem isn’t Azure, it’s your application, VM, or network configuration.
Check:

• recent deployments
• logs for error bursts
• container restarts
• dependency failures

If multiple systems across the board fail at the same time, that’s a strong outage signal.

5–15 Minutes: Identify the Scope and Impact

Once you’ve confirmed something is wrong, the next step is understanding what is affected and how badly.

5. Run Quick Health Checks for Your Critical Resources

Here are simple CLI/PowerShell checks to validate the live state:

VM Status

az vm get-instance-view –resource-group <RG> –name <VMName>

App Service State

az webapp show –resource-group <RG> –name <AppName>

Azure SQL Check

az sql db show –resource-group <RG> –server <Server> –name <DBName>

Storage Account Health

az storage account show -n <StorageName>

If multiple checks return errors or unavailable states, you’re dealing with a larger disruption.

6. Confirm Whether It’s Region-Specific

Azure outages often affect single regions rather than the entire platform.
Check issues in:

• West Europe
• East US
• Southeast Asia
• Central India
  or any region where your environment is deployed.

If your primary region is unstable but its paired region is healthy, failover becomes a realistic path.

7. Evaluate the Business Impact Quickly

At this stage, teams must know:

• Which applications are down
• How many users are impacted
• Whether the outage affects public traffic or internal services
• If authentication (AAD) is impaired

This helps prioritize your next moves.

15–30 Minutes: Apply Temporary Workarounds

Now the focus shifts to keeping systems running, even in a degraded mode.

8. Trigger Failover to Healthy Regions

If your architecture supports redundancy, initiate failover using:

• Azure Traffic Manager to redirect to healthy endpoints
• Azure Front Door to shift to a secondary backend pool
• SQL Auto-Failover Groups to promote the secondary database
• RA-GRS Storage to rely on geo-replicated read-only data
• Backup compute region to spin up minimal business-critical services

Failover is the fastest and safest workaround during a regional outage.

9. Restart or Reallocate Azure Resources (If Local Instability Is Suspected)

Only restart resources if logs indicate local degradation, not when Azure-wide services are failing.
Restarting VM scale sets, App Services, or AKS nodes can help if:

• Memory is exhausted
• The network bandwidth is saturated
• A single node is misbehaving

10. Adjust DNS or Routing Rules

If your primary endpoint is unavailable:

• Update DNS to point to a healthy service
• Temporarily lower TTL values
• Use CDN caches for stable delivery

This bypasses the failing region and keeps end users online.

11. Switch to Static or Read-Only Modes Temporarily

To reduce breakage:

• serve cached content
• activate a maintenance mode page
• move sensitive operations to read-only
• restrict background jobs until stability returns

This minimizes user frustration and protects data integrity.

30–120 Minutes: Stabilize, Test, and Recover

After workarounds are in place, your goal shifts to validating recovery and slowly restoring normal operations.

12. Run Smoke Tests Across All Key Services

Check:

• homepage load
• sign-in and identity flows
• read/write operations in your database
• core APIs
• downstream integrations
• queued jobs

This confirms whether the outage still impacts your workload.

13. Gradually Shift Traffic Back to the Primary Region

Once Microsoft resolves the incident and your tests pass:

• restore routing to the original region
• slowly increase traffic
• Watch metrics in real time
  Do not instantly switch everything at once; this can cause cascading failures.

14. Restore Full Operational State

Re-enable all functionalities you paused:

• autoscaling
• real-time write operations
• background tasks
• network routing rules
• primary storage connections

This returns your application to standard performance.

Post-Incident (2–72 Hours): Documentation & Prevention

Once the outage is over, the work isn’t finished. Proper documentation avoids repeated mistakes and strengthens your environment.

15. Preserve Logs, Alerts, and Telemetry

Save:

• VM metrics
• database latency graphs
• API failure logs
• identity failure reports
• network outage timelines

These are essential for root cause analysis.

16. File an Azure Support Ticket (If Necessary)

Include:

• affected resource names
• timestamps of failures
• exact error codes
• region details
• screenshots or logs

This accelerates support and acknowledgment. If you don’t have an Azure support plan:

You can also reach out to a reliable third-party Azure support service provider. Many teams, like Bacancy, are known for responding quickly during cloud incidents and can help you stabilize things until Azure is fully back.

17. Evaluate SLA Credit Eligibility

If the downtime exceeds Azure’s SLA, your organization may qualify for credits.
Review the SLAs for:

• VMs
• SQL databases
• Storage
• App Service and submit claims if qualified.

18. Create an Internal Post-Incident Report

Summarize:

• What happened
• How long it lasted
• Impact to users
• Which systems were affected
• Lessons learned
• What must change Share this with engineering, cloud ops, and leadership.

19. Strengthen Your Resilience Strategy

Based on the incident, improve:

• multi-region architecture
• failover automation
• monitoring and alerts
• incident runbooks
• DR testing frequency

This dramatically reduces your risk in the next outage.

Conclusion

Knowing what to do when Azure is down can save your business-critical time and minimize disruption. By following this step-by-step approach, you can quickly identify issues, apply temporary workarounds, and restore full functionality. With careful planning, monitoring, and the support of experienced Azure consultants when needed, your systems can remain resilient even during unexpected outages.

Author Bio

Chandresh Patel is a CEO, Agile coach, and founder of Bacancy Technology. His truly entrepreneurial spirit, skillful expertise, and extensive knowledge in Agile software development services have helped the organization to achieve new heights of success. Chandresh is fronting the organization into global markets systematically, innovatively, and collaboratively to fulfill custom software development needs and provide optimum quality.