Microsoft"s Cloud platform, Azure, has been hit with another widespread outage that is impacting customers across the globe. The service appears to have gone offline around 8:20 P.M. ET and is affective users in many different regions.
While Microsoft is not saying, via their support page, if this impacting customers, we can confirm that customers are impacted as my website (tracour.com) is offline because of the outage. Based on the status page for Azure, it looks like "Storage" is out in 10 out of 15 data centers which is the cause of the down time.
Microsoft has posted a note on their status page saying the following:
Starting at 19 Nov 2014 00:52 UTC we are experiencing a connectivity issue to Azure Services including Storage, Websites and Visual Studio Online. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes
For those of you who are having OneDrive issue at the moment, this outage is related to that problem as well. Further, it appears that Xbox Live is having issues because of the down time too.
These outages are costly for Microsoft, not only financially, but in terms of their reputation. Seeing that they are trying to convince more businesses to use Azure instead of on premises, their reputation for having a high degree of "up time" is a pivotal part of their pitch.
Update 0.04 PDT: Service appears to have been restored.