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September 2026

30

Incorrect Region: correction: Impacted region(s) within a previous communication has been corrected.

What happened?

Between 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026 and 02:15 UTC on 01 October 2026, a subset of customers using gateway services in multiple regions experienced degraded or interrupted network connectivity. Impacted customers may have observed gateways failing to load in the Azure Portal, along with failures or delays in network management operations across the following impacted services.

  • Azure ExpressRoute Gateway
  • Azure Firewall
  • Azure Application Gateway and Web Application Firewall
  • Azure VPN Gateway
  • Azure VMware Solution

What do we know so far?

Our investigation identified that a recent change to a regional gateway management service triggered a higher-than-expected load when an unrelated operating system servicing maintenance proceeded gradually through multiple regions. Normally, this gateway management service would auto scale as needed. Demand on dependent services increased due to the increased workload, preventing these regional services from scaling as expected. The operating system servicing maintenance was paused as a precaution.

We reverted the contributing regional gateway manager change, which reduced gateway manager load and allowed affected services to recover. We are continuing to investigate the scaling behavior and the safeguards needed to help prevent recurrence.

How did we respond?

  • 20:30 UTC on 30 September 2026 – Customer impact began.
  • 21:29 UTC on 30 September 2026 – We began investigating connectivity issues affecting Azure ExpressRoute Gateway in UK South.
  • 22:27 UTC on 30 September 2026 – We identified that the issue was affecting multiple Azure regions and expanded our investigation.
  • 23:05 UTC on 30 September 2026 – We identified a correlation with operating system servicing activity and paused further servicing while we worked to restore affected services.
  • 01:36 UTC on 01 October 2026 – Recovery progressed across most affected regions, while configuration changes were applied to remaining impacted regions, including France Central, North Europe, Southeast Asia, UK South, and UK West.
  • 02:15 UTC on 01 October 2026 – We confirmed that the issue was mitigated.

What happens next?

  • Our team will be completing an internal retrospective to understand the incident in more detail. Once that is completed, generally within 14 days, we will publish a Post Incident Review (PIR) to all impacted customers.
  • To get notified when that happens, and/or to stay informed about future Azure service issues, make sure that you configure and maintain Azure Service Health alerts – these can trigger emails, SMS, push notifications, webhooks, and more: .
  • For more information on Post Incident Reviews, refer to .
  • The impact times above represent the full incident duration, so are not specific to any individual customer. Actual impact to service availability may vary between customers and resources – for guidance on implementing monitoring to understand granular impact:
  • Finally, for broader guidance on preparing for cloud incidents, refer to .
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