Microsoft Azure Suffers Global Outage

Microsoft appears to have suffered a major outage across its collection of online offerings, with MSN and Xbox Live among several services affected.

Users across much of the US and Northern Europe were unable to access multiple services running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, including Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online, for several hours until the issue was fixed early this morning.

Microsoft confirmed that the outage was caused by “a connectivity issue across multiple Azure Services” but that Azure was now back up and running.

Asides from MSN, the issue also affected a number of Microsoft’s own web portals, including the Microsoft press centre and the Windows Store.

Not again

The news is the latest in a series of issues for Microsoft and Azure, which suffered a significant outage across much of Europe back in August. Users in multiple regions, including northern Europe, were hit by connectivity issues and service interruptions over several days until the issue was finally repaired.

August proved to be a tough period for Azure, as it was also hit by a full service interruption in the Japan East region during the month.

Microsoft is investing huge amounts in the platform as it looks to take on the likes of Amazon and Google in the cloud services market, with the three companies battling to offer the lowest prices in a highly competitive market.

Last month, Microsoft looked to gain the upper hand by offering a number of new services and security features for Azure, allowing customers to better automate deployments and gain the most from Big Data applications.

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