Microsoft has restored one of the most severe outages on the Microsoft Azure platform of 2014 after “Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Websites, Service Bus, HDInsight. Mobile Services, Backup, Site Recovery, StorSimple” and “Automation, Backup, Site Recovery” experienced full service interruptions in multiple regions. According to Reuters, the outage affected Azure services in the “US, Europe, Japan, Brazil, and the Asia Pacific region.” Azure’s recent problems began on August 14 with full service interruptions to Visual Studio Online, followed by disruptions to the ability of select users to log-in to the Azure management portal, impairments of its auto-scaling functionality and network interruptions in the Japan East region. As of the evening of August 18, “Azure core platform components are working properly” and “all the popular services are working properly” as reported on its Azure status web page. Thus far, Microsoft has offered no explanation of the outages though analysts and commentators are likely to await the release of a detailed post-mortem with baited breath given that Azure constitutes a key component of CEO Satya Nadella’s vision for the renovation and restoration of Microsoft. That the outage affected multiple regions suggests that the technical failure was systemic and significant in scope and as such, Microsoft will need to elaborate in ways that assure customers similar such outages do not recur.
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