5 Hour Azure Outage Impacts Multiple Data Centers
Microsoft is reporting that they resolved a 5 hour long outage that impacted multiple data centers within its popular Azure public cloud infrastructure. The outage has been reported by main stream media sources and it leaves IT professionals scratching their heads asking, “What went wrong?” At this point, there seems to be more questions than available answers. According to the Azure status indicator, all services are back online at this time. When Azure was having problems yesterday, the status indicator page highlighted the fact that 6 critical components in data centers spread across the globe were combating issues. The Azure status indicator gives users the ability to instantly find out if any services in specific Azure data centers are experiencing troubles.
This outage impacted an innumerable amount of end users and those who have apps built on Azure could have experienced service interruptions. The Twittersphere became engulfed with comments about Azure while others used Twitter as a way to communicate workarounds. Kevin Yu was credited with tweeting the fact that those who were impacted by the outage could have moved their cloud services into West Europe to circumvent the data center issues. Analysts have noted on how rare it is for an issue to impact multiple data centers and some have mentioned yesterday’s outage is the worst in over 18 months.
Azure users recently received an email about planned maintenance being scheduled from August 22nd to August 24th. Many industry insiders wonder if this weekend of updates is to address the issues surrounding the outages. Azure has received plenty of praise as being a legitimate public cloud service that could someday overtake Amazon AWS. Given the fact that Visual Studio Online experienced global downtime just a few days ago, it becomes clear that Microsoft’s cloud services are growing at an exponential rate. The bigger question is: “Can Microsoft keep up?”
