Dear Customers,
On October 29, between 15:45 UTC and 23:15 UTC a service outage at Microsoft Azure disrupted access to several Graphisoft services, including Archicad cloud license authentication, BIMcloud SaaS service and Graphisoft ID authentication. We understand how critical these services are to your work, and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused.
What happened?
The outage was caused by a global failure in Microsoft’s Azure Front Door service, which significantly disrupted service for a global set of organizations and millions of customers worldwide. We also use this technology to securely run our applications. Our infrastructure relies on advanced routing logic to ensure secure and seamless access to services like Graphisoft cloud licenses. These routing rules are invisible to you but essential for functionality.
Why couldn’t we mitigate the issue on our side?
For high level security, our applications are behind the Azure Front Door and disabling direct access to backend services. This setup enhances protection against unauthorized access and data exposure. However, it also meant that during the outage, we couldn’t bypass the Front Door to reroute traffic directly to our software via a Traffic Manager. Re-enabling direct access temporarily during an outage would require complex workarounds that could introduce vulnerabilities. We are actively exploring safer alternatives to improve resilience without compromising the security of your data.
What we’re doing next
We are taking this incident seriously and are already working on:
• Architectural improvements to reduce reliance on single points of failure.
• Evaluating emergency licensing solutions and overconsumption policies to ensure uninterrupted access during future outages.
• Investigating license polling behaviour that caused software freezes with some customers, with our Research & Development teams prioritizing a fix.
What can you do?
We received reports that named cloud license check made Archicad freeze in every 30-90 seconds. While this happened in conjunction with the outage, it was not a global phenomenon. If you faced this issue throughout yesterday’s outage, please contact your local support to have your case investigated directly.
We are committed to learning from this event and making our systems more robust, secure, and customer-friendly. Your feedback is invaluable, and we thank you for your patience and continued trust.
Best regards,
Csaba Kézér
VP, Global Customer Support
Graphisoft
