Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Struggles with Service Outages Monday update from August 2014

Microsoft Azure team updated its uptime status around 3 p.m. Pacific to “Partial Service Interruption” after reporting “Full Service Interruption” in multiple regions of the cloud infrastructure earlier in the day.

Issues started around 1 a.m. Monday morning, according to a post on the service health dashboard for Azure, which said a number of services on the cloud platform, including virtual machines, websites, backup and site recovery, were experiencing full service interruptions in multiple regions. The company did not immediately provide a reason for the outages.

In an update posted around 3 p.m., the Azure team said a small subset of customers was still experiencing connectivity issues to some of the cloud services. By that time, services had been restored in Japan and East Asia regions.

Around 4 p.m., services hosted by data centers serving US Central, US East, US East 2 and Europe North regions were still having issues. Affected services included Cloud Services, SQL Database, Virtual Machines, Websites, HDInsight, Mobile Services, Service Bus, Site Recovery and StorSimple.

Both US East 2 and US Central regions are new, the former hosted by a data center in Virginia and the latter in Iowa. The company announced their addition in July.

Microsoft is one of the world’s largest providers of public cloud infrastructure services, competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services and, increasingly, Google Compute Engine. Cloud outages and degraded performance incidents are a common occurrence for public cloud providers who operate massive global data center infrastructures.

This is not Azure’s first full service interruption this month. The company reported full service interruption in its Japan East region on August 15 and another one across multiple regions on August 14.

Our sister site Web Host Industry Review has a roundup of Azure’s recent uptime issues.