Azure Taken Down By Series Of Issues

Microsoft’s cloud message has taken a knock after its Azure service suffered multiple global outages over the past week that has left customers unable to access any of services.

The past few days have seen the service offline in the US, Brazil and Japan, according to Microsoft.

This is in addition to service-wide interruptions to other services such as Virtual Studio and its management portal.

Problems began on 8 August, when customers in Japan suffered, in the words of Microsoft, a “partial performance degradation” that wasn’t fixed until the Monday after - the 11th.

Customers in Japan also experienced auto-scaling problems with Cloud Services and with Virtual Machines, and the firm’s Japan East data centre recording the brunt of the problems.

The same day, the 8th, the Azure management portal experienced issues that stopped users logging in with many receiving an "Error 500" message and engineers reported that “a retry would likely have resolved the issue for any impacted customers.”

It all quickly became a Black Friday for Azure as its western US region customers next saw a “partial service interruption” that affected customers of its Cloud Services, Storage and Backup services.

Performance Degradation

Brazilian customers didn’t see problems until the 11th when, for around four hours, “intermittent connectivity issues” hit Azure services deployed in the south of the country.

Microsoft has admitted this was related to network infrastructure issues.

Customers on the eastern side of the US weren’t left out as another “partial performance degradation” affected the data centre on the 12th, with customers likely to have experienced “issues with proper data flow to their Auto-Scale configurations.”

Visual Studio Online, meanwhile, saw a full outage as customers reported problems related to latency and extended execution times and, though the service was restored after several hours, Microsoft is still investigating the root cause.

Microsoft has managed to repair all the problems with Azure and it forms a major part of new CEO Satya Nadella's plan to turn Microsoft into a company that generates significant revenues from cloud, as opposed to on-premise application software and OS.