
On Wednesday, users of the Windows Azure Cloud were plagued with all sorts of issues such as users not being able to upload files onto their websites as well as being unable to perform management functions. According to a release from Microsoft, the company has experienced this issue in all markets including “North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US.” This news was first reported at 6:20PM EST. Users are continuing to have troubles uploading files through FTP however they should be able to upload them to using Web Deploy or Git. As Azure Cloud users may be aware, the dashboard reports “Widespread management problems for the Azure Compute cloud.”
As Microsoft tries to brand itself in the cloud market, events such as these that have gone unresolved for over 12 hours do not help the company’s image. Microsoft has advised its Azure Cloud users to delay any swap deployment operations. The alert many users were seeing said “Manual actions to perform Swap Deployment operations on Cloud Services may error, which will then restrict Service Management functions. At this time we advise customers to delay any Swap Deployment operations. We are taking all necessary steps to mitigate this incident for the affected hosted services as soon as possible.”
The online reaction to this has been less than positive as there still seemed to be issues on Thursday morning. Many analysts are questioning the provisioning and partitioning policies in place with the Azure cloud. This event also marks the second time in under a year that Microsoft has dealt with a global issue affecting Azure Cloud services. Microsoft has promised to continue to produce updates every 2 hours in efforts to keep their customers briefed on the situation. Microsoft went on to say “We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.”