Microsoft’s cloud service was hit with an unexpected global outage today, lasting nearly an hour. “An alert for Websites and Storage in multiple regions is being investigated. It has not been determined if this is customer impacting. More information will be provided as it is known,” the Azure Status page stated during the outage.
The status page has since been updated, but it was quite obvious that this outage affected various Microsoft products and services. For example, OneDrive would not let you see your files. Most if not all of Microsoft’s official blogs were down, and the Microsoft Band wouldn’t sync.
Other services like the Tweetium app would not function properly, the Xbox Live service had some issues affecting online games and achievements on both Xbox 360 and the Xbox One, and the official DVLUP Windows Phone developer website was offline as well as other websites that were hosted on Azure.
Saving to OneDrive from Microsoft Office appears to be down as a result of the Azure outage.
— Jonathan Pierce (@clubdirthill) November 19, 2014
Because the @azure outage results in HTTP 500 errors, all my monitoring alerts are freaking out for every deployment.
— Brandon Paddock (@BrandonLive) November 19, 2014
Microsoft’s disastrous inability to keep Azure outages confined to a single region is a major red flag for enterprises considering Azure.
— Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) November 19, 2014
At the time of this post, Azure services have returned to normal after nearly 30 minutes of downtime (Update: Then it went back down again). Services dependent on Azure have yet to fully recover. Microsoft has yet to offer an explanation but this outage goes to show you that our dependence on the ‘cloud’ can leave us helpless when an outage hits.
The last time Azure was hit with a global outage was back in August of this year. Azure competes against Google and Amazon’s cloud offerings and this major global outage is quite unusual to see.
Are you using a service that is dependent on Microsoft Azure? Were you affected by this outage? Sound off in the comments below.
Update: Looks like Azure is still down. Microsoft has updated the Azure Status page yet again. “Starting at 19 Nov 2014 00:52 UTC we are experiencing a connectivity issue to multiple Azure Services, including Storage, Websites, Azure Search, Azure Cache, Management Portal, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Visual Studio, Machine Learning, HDInsights, Automation, Virtual Network, Stream Analytics, Active Directory.”
Update(an hour later): “A fix has been applied to affected environment. Customers should starting seeing availability improvement across all regions.”
Further reading: Azure, Microsoft, Microsoft Band, OneDrive