Azure Users Hit By Outage

Microsoft‘s Azure cloud platform users in multiple regions, including northern Europe, have been hit by connectivity issues and service interruptions on Monday and Tuesday.

The problems were first noted on Microsoft’s Azure status page on Monday evening, and and included a “partial service interruption” to services including Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and Web sites, the company said. Other services affected included Mobile Services, Service Bus, Site Recovery, HDInsight and StorSimple.

‘Full service interruption’

The company said a “small subset of customers” experienced a “full service interruption” to these as well as “possible other Azure Services”.

In a separate advisory, Microsoft said some users in northern Europe had “experienced intermittent connectivity issues to their websites” for several hours, from 11 p.m. BST on Monday to 3 a.m. BST on Tuesday.

“This incident has now been mitigated,” Microsoft said in the advisory, published early on Tuesday morning.

The company did not provide further details as to the cause of the interruption, but said in an advisory that service had begun to be restored after “updates were deployed across the affected environment”.

Recent outages

Microsoft said in a statement on Monday night: “Per our message to customers on the Azure Status page, we are aware of an interruption with Azure services, including Virtual Machines, Cloud Services and Web sites, and are working with our engineering teams to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.”

As of 10 a.m. BST on Tuesday, all Azure services were running normally, Microsoft said.

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Online service recently experienced a worldwide outage, which the company attributed to bugs in the software, rather than in Azure itself. Microsoft CRM Online experienced a service interruption last week, and Azure was hit by a full service interruption in the Japan East region on 15 August.

BT recently began offering dedicated access to Azure for customers who rely on the platform to run their applications.

Azure competes with similar services from Amazon, Google and others.

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