Azure maintenance mess disrupted hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services

Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft's status page says it has paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event." The event started at 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026. ExpressRoute Gateway is a service that connects on-prem networks to virtual networks in Azure, making it an important element of a hybrid cloud. Azure VPN Gateway creates a secure tunnel between on-prem infrastructure and Azure. Microsoft pitches its Azure VMware Service as an ideal way to build a hybrid cloud on VMware. This incident is therefore likely to make life hard for Microsoft's hybrid cloud customers. At the time of writing, the incident impacts 18 Azure regions: West US, West US 3, North Europe, West Europe, France Central, UK West, UK South, Switzerland North, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Japan West, Korea Central, South Africa North, UAE North, Mexico Central, Germany North, South India, and Jio India Central. The Azure VMware service isn't impacted in the last four of those regions. As of 23:13 UTC, Microsoft says it is seeing continued recovery across impacted ExpressRoute gateways and are monitoring this recovery to confirm that it remains durable." The company also advised that some affected VPN Gateways have experienced reduced redundancy rather than a complete loss of connectivity. Some supporting network management components have not recovered automatically and are contributing to management operation failures in a subset of affected regions," the update adds. Engineering teams are actively restoring these components using alternate healthy instances where available." Microsoft doesn't know what happened, or why, but says its investigation continues to show a correlation between this event and infrastructure operating system servicing activity." The Register will update this story as Microsoft releases more information. (R) UPDATED AT O3:30 UTC, OCTOBER 1 To add that Microsoft says it has mitigatged the incident, in a status update which also mentions more products - the Azure Firewall, Application Gateways, and Web Application Firewall - as being impacted. Redmond has promised to release more info, too.