The July 23 2026 Azure West US Outage: IP Route Removal and Downstream Impact
· 9 min read
Introduction
On July 23, 2026, Microsoft Azure experienced a connectivity outage in the West US region that blocked traffic entering or leaving the region for nearly five hours. Workloads that stayed entirely inside West US were not affected. Microsoft's preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) attributes the failure to a bug in maintenance request conversion software that removed IP routes from more devices than intended during routine device maintenance.
IncidentHub detected a wave of downstream SaaS outages tied to the Azure incident. Acknowledgement times on those status pages varied widely - from a few minutes to more than three hours after Azure's impact began.
