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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.
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.