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Microsoft's Azure Cloud Suffers Major Downtime

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the higher-availability-through-cloud-computing dept.

New submitter dcraid writes with a quote from El Reg: "Microsoft's cloudy platform, Windows Azure, is experiencing a major outage: at the time of writing, its service management system had been down for about seven hours worldwide. A customer described the problem to The Register as an 'admin nightmare' and said they couldn't understand how such an important system could go down. 'This should never happen,' said our source. 'The system should be redundant and outages should be confined to some data centres only.'" The Azure service dashboard has regular updates on the situation. According to their update feed the situation should have been resolved a few hours ago but has instead gotten worse: "We continue to work through the issues that are blocking the restoration of service management for some customers in North Central US, South Central US and North Europe sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers." To be fair, other cloud providers have had similar issues before.

6 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. last time by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Informative

    Last time a Microsoft cloud product went down, users sustained real data loss. Of course, Microsoft claimed it couldn't happen with Azure.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  2. Re:Cloud services not ready by timeOday · · Score: 3, Informative

    I agree, I have nothing against the idea of cloud services, but they do need to work and reputations are based on events like this. After an outage this long, it takes a LOOONG time to earn your way back to five nines (which works out to 5.5 minutes of downtime per year).

  3. Advice by DickBreath · · Score: 4, Informative

    Use the MCSE mantra:
    1. Perform virus scan.
    2. If that doesn't work, find a different program that will display a reassuring green graphic.
    3. If that doesn't work, reboot.
    4. If that doesn't work, reformat, reinstall.
    5. If that doesn't work, GOTO 1.

    Microsoft wouldn't know anything about data center running if it were chase aftering them at full speedo.

    Google this: "Microsoft Sidekick / Danger"

    http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/10/t-mobile-sidekick-disaster-microsofts-servers-crashed-and-they-dont-have-a-backup/

    https://www.pcworld.com/article/173470/microsoft_redfaced_after_massive_sidekick_data_loss.html

    http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/11/microsofts_danger_sidekick_data_loss_casts_dark_on_cloud_computing.html

    --

    I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
  4. Re:2/29/2012 by the_other_chewey · · Score: 5, Informative

    From the service dashboard:

    "4:00 AM UTC We have identified the root cause of this incident. It has been traced back to a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT."

    So yeah, a leap day bug sounds probable.

  5. Re:Cloud services not ready by UnknowingFool · · Score: 4, Informative

    You mean besides Amazon, SalesForce, VMWare, Google Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Apple iCloud. Seriously who hasn't had downtime?

    --
    Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
  6. Re:Eggs? by AlienIntelligence · · Score: 1, Informative

    What ghetto assed university do you go to where they cannot get their server straight?

    -AI

    --
    For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion