Any timeline when AFD cache purges be back to normal?

Question

Hello,

Currently, cache purges take 20 minutes; in CloudFront, it's a minute, max, which is making Azure CDN very hard to use with apps where new deploys occur fast and often (like in any non-legacy SaaS).

Is there any timeline when AFD be back to normal as before the previous year's outage, or shall we switch to CloudFront?

Answer 1

Hi ,

Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.

There is no public commitment from Azure that cache purge latency in Azure front door will return to the sub-minute behaviour seen before last year’s incident, and recent service updates suggest the platform is prioritising stability and global consistency over ultra-fast invalidations. If your release model depends on near instant cache refresh, the current ~20min window is unlikely to improve materially in the short term. In that case, moving latency-sensitive workloads to AWS cloudfront or adopting versioned asset URLs (cache busting) on azure are the practical options; switching providers only makes sense if cache invalidation speed is a hard architectural requirement rather than an optimisation. 

Please 'Upvote'(Thumbs-up) and 'Accept' as answer if the reply was helpful. This will be benefitting other community members who face the same issue.

Answer 2

Hi Jakhongir Mustafaev,

Thanks for reaching out in Microsoft Q&A forum,

Is there any timeline when AFD be back to normal as before the previous year's outage, or shall we switch to CloudFront? No official timeline exists for Azure Front Door (AFD) cache purges to return to pre-2025 outage speeds current times remain 20-45 minutes due to added safety measures.

Purge requests propagate gradually across POPs with extra validation steps, causing extended delays and instability like 404 errors during deploys.

Check the steps:

• Versioned URLs: Automate build hashes (e.g., bundle.abc123.js) in Azure DevOps pipelines to force fresh fetches without purges.
• Short TTLs: Set 1–5-minute Time-to-Live on dynamic paths via AFD rules engine.
• No-Cache Rules: Bypass caching on deploys paths or add Cache-Control: no-cache headers from origin.
• Path-Specific Purges: Target only changed paths (e.g., /static/v2/*) using Azure CLI/PowerShell.

These align with your Azure scripting expertise for stable, frequent SaaS deploys.

Reference:

• Cache purging for Azure Front Door | Microsoft Learn
• Caching - Azure Front Door | Microsoft Learn

Kindly let us know if the above helps or you need further assistance on this issue.

Please do not forget to and “up-vote” wherever the information provided helps you, this can be beneficial to other community members.