Microsoft Azure's Southern US Data Center Goes Down For Hours, Impacting Office365 and Active Directory Customers (geekwire.com)

New submitter courcoul alerted us to Azure outage, which is affecting several customers in many parts of the world: Some Microsoft Azure customers with workloads running in its South Central US data center are having big problems coming back from the holiday weekend Tuesday, after shutdown procedures were initiated following a spike in temperature inside one of its facilities. Around 230am Pacific Time, Microsoft identified problems with the cooling systems in one part of its Texas data center complex, which caused a spike in temperature and forced it to shut down equipment in order to prevent a more catastrophic failure, according to the Azure status page. These issues have also caused cascading effects for some Microsoft Office 365 users as well as those who rely on Microsoft Active Directory to log into their accounts. The cooling system is the most critical part of a modern data center, given the intense heat produced by thousands of servers cranking away in an enclosed area. More resources: The official status page of Azure; and third-party web tracking tool DownDetector's assessment. Further reading: Microsoft Azure suffers outage after cooling issue.

Comments

Comment

[WallyL]

My employer was affected. Many employees could not authenticate to our third-party webapps because we use whatever the cloud-provided Active Directory SSO solution is. Ah, well. I wonder if this violated SLAs and we get some money back... My company is always concerned about not violating our SLAs to our customers (Saas), so hopefully we extract the same pound of flesh from our vendors.

Re:Comment

[hawguy]

Being dependent upon "the cloud" is not a good thing, and yet so many companies are throwing out their brains and signing up in the hope to reduce costs. The company that recently purchased my previous employer is in whole hog for Microsoft, Microsoft 360, Microsoft cloud, and anything with the word Microsoft attached, most of it all online only. To read some corporate announcements I have to log into a third party site which just seems absurd to me. When the cloud servers eventually get their inevitable downtime, I predict a lot of hand wringing.

I haven't seen this level of slavish devotion to a single vendor since the IBM administration.

For most small to mid-sized businesses, "the cloud" is more reliable than any solution they'd be willing to pay for. I don't know Microsoft's redundancy model, but AWS's multi-AZ model gives much more redundancy than most businesses would build themselves -- even more so for multi-region redundancy since most companies aren't going to spend the money to duplicate their production environment in another region on the other side of the country (or world).

Though the side effect of using a cloud provider is that when a major cloud provider goes down, so do a *lot* of businesses -- but that doesn't mean they would have been better off building their own datacenter.

Re:Infrastructure management

[Anonymous Coward]

I maintain HVAC for cell sites. EVERYONE I've worked on had TWO independent HVAC systems.

They toggle back and forth to equalize wear and tear, but when one fails the other system takes control and sends me an email asking for attention.

There is no reason in the world for a data center NOT to have multiple HVAC systems in place. The equipment is pocket change compared to the electronics it protects.

It could be M$ should put more thought in the design of their data centers than was put into Win95 or Vista.

Just saying....