Azure Outage Impacts MSN, Xbox Live & More
Microsoft’s popular cloud service Azure reported a serious outage on Tuesday. Azure, which is considered by many analysts to be apart of cloud’s “Big Three” IaaS vendors, mentioned on its website that it started seeing problems around 2PM EST yesterday. The service outages impacted all regions including the Central U.S., East U.S., West U.S., and North Europe.
This morning, the Azure status portal mentions that there still minor location specific interruptions plaguing the system although the website lists that Azure core platform components are functioning properly. News services such as Reuters are reporting that the outages also impacts Microsoft’s flagship internet portal website MSN. VentureBeat is reporting that this outage also impacted other Microsoft services such as Xbox Live.
The Xbox live website gave gamers this message as they checked the statuses of the service: “Are you experiencing issues on Live with features such as matchmaking, adding or viewing Friends, Messaging, and Achievements? Our team is engaged and working hard to get everything resolved. Thanks for your patience while we get this worked out.”
Microsoft PR department released a statement saying, “Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services; we are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible.”
These service outages seem to be the most widespread outages in quite some time for Microsoft Azure. CloudWedge has extensively written about Microsoft Azure including its recent announcements to expand, charge lower prices and compete one-on-one with Amazon Web Services. The last major Microsoft Azure outage happened back in August. The 5 hour outage was reported to have left customers in the dark about what had actually happened until a few days later. If Microsoft follows the same script, we may not know the root cause of this week’s service troubles although most services seem to up and running just fine today.
