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Microsoft Azure Failure: SSL Certificates Were Updated... Sort Of

Posted by Unknown on from the embrace-the-slack dept.

judgecorp writes "Microsoft has published an explanation of the failure of Windows Azure earlier this month. Users of the Azure storage saw that an SSL certificate had expired. Microsoft's explanation says that the certificate had in fact been renewed, but an update with the new certificate details was not prioritized, and hadn't actually been implemented till after the old certificate expired. There are more interesting details, but Microsoft says better alerts and more automation will stop this particular fault happening again."

12 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. Re:When will they accept Windows 8 as a failure? by theRunicBard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look, I know nobody cares, but Microsoft Azure has nothing to do with Windows 8. I'm also not sure it's a failure. Microsoft tried something new after getting great positive reviews for Windows 7, which is the BEST time to try something risky. Worst case, people skip one generation of Windows, and stick with... Windows. Best case, you redefine the PC interface. It is innovative, no matter how poorly implemented. Besides, Microsoft has a history of creating a shitty first version and then fixing kinks as time goes by. Was anyone expecting a good first version of Metro? The slow adoption numbers can easily be credited to how good Windows 7 is. Why would you switch? It costs $0 for me to stay on 7, and > $0 to upgrade. We won't be seeing many Windows 8 devices for a while. The timely upgrades brought about by Windows Blue might even spur more adoption (too early to tell, I think). Windows Phones I won't attempt to defend since I know nothing of them.

  2. It won't happen again by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unless I'm horribly mistaken, they've let certificates expire before. Why would I think they won't let it happen again?

    1. Re:It won't happen again by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Interesting
      Yeah, and they also had the Sidekick outage with actual data loss. A lovely quote from that article:

      "I asked Microsoft for comment Saturday when I was writing this, in particular as to how the rest of its cloud might differ from the Danger set up. Microsoft said Sunday that its the fabric controller that manages the Azure service is built with redundancy in mind. "

      It may be built with redundancy in mind, but apparently it still has at least one single point of failure.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:It won't happen again by 93+Escort+Wagon · · Score: 4, Informative

      Some of us remember when they forgot to renew hotmail.com. I'd say that might be worse...

      --
      #DeleteChrome
    3. Re:It won't happen again by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I always back up my cloud data to a local harddrive, just to be safe.

    4. Re:It won't happen again by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Maybe. It seems to me that if the engineers have let the manager become powerful enough to be a single point of failure, they've designed the system wrong.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    5. Re:It won't happen again by girlintraining · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Maybe. It seems to me that if the engineers have let the manager become powerful enough to be a single point of failure, they've designed the system wrong.

      You're fired. Anyone else have a problem with the manager?

      --
      #fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
    6. Re:It won't happen again by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Of course I don't tell THEM that, I just build around them and let them think they are useful. Sometimes we have meetings whose sole purpose is to affirm the usefulness of the manager.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    7. Re:It won't happen again by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 3, Informative

      Nice! I like the fact that it was a linux user who paid the renewal fee and got passport.com back up again, allowing further logins into hotmail. Linky to credit card receipt of individual user : The lapse, which was first reported on the Internet news service Slashdot.org, was apparently caused when Microsoft's registration for the Passport.com domain name expired sometime Dec. 24, Chaney said. The Passport.com site verifies user identification and passwords for access to Hotmail and about 25 other services, according to Chaney. Chaney said he paid the bill Dec. 25 at about 2 p.m. EST and was given invoice #11395965 documenting the transaction. An electronic copy of the receipt can be viewed at his Web site at "www.doublewide.net."

    8. Re:It won't happen again by frinkster · · Score: 3, Interesting

      None of which can claim to be better than 99.999% uptime, since it's practically impossible to achieve.

      Having worked for half a decade on mobile communications infrastructure that regularly exceed 99.999% uptime, I feel qualified to say that it is neither impossible nor super difficult. If it is a goal and you are willing to spend a lot of money than you can accomplish it.

      But nobody is going to pay $X for 99.99999% uptime when 98% uptime is available for $X / 100 unless they are forced to. Look at all of the various highly-funded internet services that go down completely when a single Amazon data center has an outage. They aren't even willing to pay a little bit extra and do the extra work to make their services run on multiple data centers at a time. Clearly, it is not a requirement of the venture capital that they are getting.

  3. Typical scenario of ... by Skapare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... managers saying "we need to get this up and running sooner ... automating it reliably is hard to do ... just get it working and update things manually for now and we will automate it later". When later comes, everyone is working on something else.

    --
    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  4. Re:When will they accept Windows 8 as a failure? by phntm · · Score: 3, Informative

    the adoption rates for students who get windows 8 for free is non existant at least by the anecdotal evidence in my faculty (computer science).
    even during exam season (when you suddenly get the urge to clean the room, re-check the fridge or format your laptop).
    you can piss on my face but don't tell me it's raining.