Microsoft Has Revealed The Cause Of November’s Mass Outage
Azure’s Root Cause Analysis shows bad ‘flighting’ was the issue
Microsoft has published a detailed analysis of what caused the mass Azure outage in November.
The outage, which started on November 18, and appeared to last for up to two days for some regions, knocked out Azure storage, websites, and other services across US and Northern Europe. Even MSN and Xbox live were down, affecting thousands of users.
Route Cause Analysis
Writing on the Azure blog, Jason Zander, the CVP for Azure, said: “On November 18, 2014, many of our Microsoft Azure customers experienced a service interruption that impacted Azure Storage and several other services, including Virtual Machines.
“Today, we’re sharing our final RCA (route cause analysis), which includes a comprehensive outline of steps we’ve taken to mitigate against this situation happening again, as well as steps we’re taking to improve our communications and support response. We sincerely apologise and recognise the significant impact this service interruption may have had on your applications and services.”
It appears that the cause was a dodgy bit of ‘flighting’, which is effectively the term of testing new updates and codes.
Zander explained: “There are two types of Azure Storage deployments: software deployments (i.e. publishing code) and configuration deployments (i.e. change settings). Both software and configuration deployments require multiple stages of validation and are incrementally deployed 
to the Azure infrastructure in small batches. This progressive deployment approach is called ‘flighting.’ When flights are in progress, we closely monitor health checks. As continued usage and testing demonstrates successful results, we will deploy the change to additional slices across the Azure Storage infrastructure.”
The RCA found that a change had already been flighted on a portion of the production infrastructure for several weeks.
“Unfortunately, the configuration tooling did not have adequate enforcement of this policy of incrementally deploying the change across the infrastructure,” said Zander.
To make sure it doesn’t happen again, Microsoft said it has “released an update to our deployment system tooling to enforce compliance to the above testing and flighting policies for standard updates, whether code or configuration”.
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