Microsoft has fixed a glitch in its Windows Azure cloud based service that started late on Tuesday but was fixed earlier today. The partial outage affected the management feature in the Compute section but the issue hit all of the regions that Windows Azure serves around the world.
According to PCWorld, the problems began on Tuesday around 10:35 p.m. ET when the Windows Azure service dashboard noted the Compute problems. The issues this week did not actually affect how applications are run on Azure, which is part of the reason why this outage was not widely reported until today.
The service dashboard posted an update on Wednesday that stated, "Manual actions to perform Swap Deployment operations on Cloud Services may error, which will then restrict Service Management functions." Around 8:45 a.m. on Thursday, Microsoft said that full service had been restored for Windows Azure. It"s likely that the company will issue some kind of post-mortem on the incident in the near future.
This is the third such large outage for Windows Azure inside of a year. In December 2012, one server cluster in the south central portion of the US went down for a few days. In February, an outage hit all of its server clusters due to an expired HTTPS certificate.
Source: PCWorld | Image via Microsoft