Microsoft Azure Goes Dark For 22 Hours

By Craig Balding

Forget concerns about PCI and DR in the Clouds - Microsoft Azure just recovered from being offline for 22 hours.

The Azure Cloud is currently in Technology Preview mode which means unscheduled developer holidays are pre-baked in.

I haven’t written about Azure before (tut tut), however I have been following along.

In case you somehow missed the announcement from Ray Ozzie, this is the Azure Stack.

About_-_What_is_the_Azure_Services_Platform%3F_%7C_Azure_Services_Platform-20090315-205153 Microsoft Azure Goes Dark For 22 Hours

And this is what it looked like to the Azure development community for the past 22 hours:

About_-_What_is_the_Azure_Services_Platform%3F_%7C_Azure_Services_Platform-20090315-205433 Microsoft Azure Goes Dark For 22 Hours

As seems to be the case for Cloud outages, updates are posted to a support forum.  Here is all anyone knows thus far (via Oakleaf Systems):

OakLeaf_Systems__Azure_Services_Outage_3_13_2009_%E2%80%93_A_Brief_History-20090315-210308 Microsoft Azure Goes Dark For 22 Hours

This was obviously a significant outage and it will be interesting to understand the root cause.  These massively distributed systems are truly an enormous engineering challenge - we’ll wait to see what Microsoft (and others) can learn from this particular incident.

I look forward to exploring the security aspects of Azure with you in the upcoming weeks.