Following the recent global outages suffered by users of Azure cloud services, Microsoft is actively working to provide Service Level Agreement Service Credits to those affected. As such, users are advised not to submit SLA claims as there is no need.
Microsoft goes on to state that they are currently still investigating the source of the issues that have plagued users of the Azure cloud services across the globe last week. Though attempts have been made through Twitter and other social media channels to openly show progress on a solution, it is yet to be seen what the long-term fallout of this situation may be, even if Microsoft understand the gravity of the situation.
The viability of cloud services depends on the trust that businesses and individuals place upon them, and much like Blackberry (then Research In Motion) found to their displeasure in years past, a reputation takes years to build and mere moments to destroy.
On Tuesday, November 18, 2014, Azure Storage services experienced a service interruption across the United States, Europe, and parts of Asia. This impacted multiple cloud services in these regions, and we want to apologize for the disruption this has caused. We know our customers put their trust in us and we take that very seriously. A detailed analysis regarding the cause and rollback are shared in Microsoft Azure Team CVP Jason Zander’s blog post.
Part of the interruption also impacted our ability to provide timely updates via the Service Health Dashboard. As a mitigation, we leveraged Twitter and other social media forums. We also provided targeted communication to the Azure Management Portal for affected customers as available.
We want you to know that as a customer impacted by this incident, there is no need to submit a Service Level Agreement (SLA) Claim. We will validate and proactively issue SLA Service Credits in the billing month subsequent to the incident.
When we have an incident like this, our main focus is rapid time to recovery for our customers, but we also work to closely examine what went wrong and help ensure we make the necessary improvements. That’s why we will continue to investigate what led to this event and will drive the needed improvements to avoid similar situations in the future.
Thank you,
Your Azure Team
