04:52 PM EDT, 10/29/2025 (MT Newswires) -- Microsoft ( MSFT ) reported stronger-than-expected fiscal first-quarter results on a day that was marred by outages in its Azure cloud computing and 365 services.

Adjusted per-share earnings increased to $4.13 during the three months ended September from $3.37 a year earlier, higher than the consensus on FactSet for $3.67. Revenue rose 18% to $77.67 billion, exceeding Wall Street's $75.38 billion view.

Shares were down 2.3% in after-hours trading, but had gained nearly 29% this year through Wednesday close.

Earlier in the day, users reported problems accessing Microsoft's ( MSFT ) products and services including Azure, 365 and Xbox, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.

"Customers and Microsoft ( MSFT ) services leveraging Azure Front Door may have experienced latencies, timeouts, and errors," according to the latest update on Azure's status page. "We have confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change was the trigger event for this issue."

The company anticipate "full mitigation" within the next four hours as it deployed a fix.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) 365's status page also confirmed the deployment of a healthy configuration.

"We're continuing our active traffic balancing efforts as well as monitoring corresponding service telemetry to ensure widespread recovery," it said.

The disruption follows an Amazon Web Services outage last week that impacted websites and apps of airlines and telecommunications, as well as social media platforms. AWS is Amazon.com's ( AMZN ) cloud computing platform.

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) intelligent cloud segment's sales jumped 28% annually to $30.9 billion in the first quarter, driven by a 40% surge in Azure and other cloud services, the tech giant said in its earnings release.

The productivity and business processes division reported a 17% sales increase to $33.02 billion, buoyed by gains in 365 and LinkedIn. The more personal computing unit rose 4% to $13.76 billion as Windows sales grew by 6%.

OpenAI has contracted to purchase an incremental $250 billion of Azure services from Microsoft ( MSFT ), which won't have the right of first refusal to provide computing services to the ChatGPT maker, Microsoft ( MSFT ) said Tuesday.

UBS Securities said in a note that the $250 billion commitment is larger than expected and should boost "out-year Azure growth forecasts."

"This announcement removes an overhang and solidifies the (long-term) relationship (between Microsoft ( MSFT ) and OpenAI), and the current Azure growth trends are strong enough such that we remain positive into the (fiscal first-quarter) print," UBS analysts including Karl Keirstead wrote in the note emailed Wednesday morning.

Microsoft ( MSFT ) will hold a 27% stake in OpenAI, which is transitioning into a public benefit corporation. That stake, however, "landed just a bit lower than we expected," Keirstead said.