Microsoft was hit with outages in its Azure cloud and 365 services on Wednesday, hours before the company’s scheduled earnings release.

Users on social media reported problems accessing their sites and services running on Microsoft’s products, and the company’s websites, including its investor relations page, were down. The problems began around 11:40 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector, which relies on user reports.

“We are working to address an issue affecting Azure Front Door that is impacting the availability of some services,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Customers should continue to check their Service Health Alerts and the latest update on this issue can be found on the Azure status page.”

The Azure support account on X said, “We’re investigating an issue impacting several Azure services,” and that “customers may experience issues when accessing services.”

The latest update on Azure’s status page says that issues began with AFD at about noon ET, “resulting in a loss of availability of some services.” The company said it suspects an “inadvertent configuration change” was the trigger and that it’s “rolling back to our last known good state” for AFD services.

“We do not have an ETA for when the rollback will be completed, but we will update this communication within 30 minutes or when we have an update,” the company wrote.

Microsoft’s 365 status account wrote that its services are “experiencing downstream impact related to the ongoing Azure outage.”

The service disruptions come a little over a week after larger rival Amazon Web Services reported a major outage that took down numerous websites. Throughout the day on Oct. 20, AWS said it observed “increased error rates” for customers when trying to launch new instances in EC2, its popular cloud service that provides virtual server capacity.

AWS leads in cloud infrastructure with 32% of the market as of the first quarter, according to Canalys. Azure is second at 23%, followed by Google’s cloud unit at 10%. Azure and Google Cloud have been growing faster of late, driven by a boom in artificial intelligence workloads.

All three companies are set to report quarterly results this week, starting with Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet on Wednesday after the bell. Amazon reports on Thursday.

Alaska Airlines said on Wednesday afternoon that it’s currently “experiencing a disruption to key systems,” including websites, due to the outage on Azure, “where several Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines services are hosted.” Alaska closed its $1.9 billion acquisition of Hawaiian last year.

In March, Microsoft suffered an outage over a weekend that left tens of thousands of users unable to access their Outlook email accounts and other programs.

WATCH: OpenAI clears restructuring hurdle.

OpenAI on Wednesday announced two reasoning models that developers can use to classify a range of online safety harms on their platforms. 

The artificial intelligence models are called gpt-oss-safeguard-120b and gpt-oss-safeguard-20b, and their names reflect their sizes. They are fine-tuned, or adapted, versions of OpenAI’s gpt-oss models, which the company announced in August. 

OpenAI is introducing them as so-called open-weight models, which means their parameters, or the elements that improve the outputs and predictions during training, are publicly available. Open-weight models can offer transparency and control, but they are different from open-source models, whose full source code becomes available for users to customize and modify.

Organizations can configure the new models to their specific policy needs, OpenAI said. And since they are reasoning models that show their work, developers will have more direct insight into how they arrive at a particular output. 

For instance, a product reviews site could develop a policy and use gpt-oss-safeguard models to screen reviews that might be fake, OpenAI said. Similarly, a video game discussion forum could classify posts that discuss cheating.

OpenAI developed the models in partnership with Robust Open Online Safety Tools, or ROOST, an organization dedicated to building safety infrastructure for AI. Discord and SafetyKit also helped test the models. They are initially available in a research preview, and OpenAI said it will seek feedback from researchers and members of the safety community.

As part of the launch, ROOST is establishing a model community for researchers and practitioners that are using AI models in an effort to protect online spaces.

The announcement could help OpenAI placate some critics who have accused the startup of commercializing and scaling too quickly at the expense of AI ethics and safety. The startup is valued at $500 billion, and its consumer chatbot, ChatGPT, has surpassed 800 million weekly active users. 

On Tuesday, OpenAI said it’s completed its recapitalization, cementing its structure as a nonprofit with a controlling stake in its for-profit business. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit lab, but has emerged as the most valuable U.S. tech startup in the years since releasing ChatGPT in late 2022.

“As AI becomes more powerful, safety tools and fundamental safety research must evolve just as fast — and they must be accessible to everyone,” ROOST President Camille François, said in a statement.

Eligible users can download the model weights on Hugging Face, OpenAI said.

WATCH: OpenAI finalizes recapitalization plan