On Friday, some owners of Microsoft"s Xbox 360 game console were unable to access some of their cloud-based save storage files. The downtime for that feature still continues and its likely the issue is related to some issues for the company"s Windows Azure services.
Since Friday, one server cluster in the south central portion of the US has been down, according to the Windows Azure status page. The status page currently says:
Our engineering teams immediately triaged the issue and have been working around the clock to restore service to affected customers. These repair steps however are taking longer than expected to implement to ensure that there is no impact to customer data.
The page said that Microsoft apologizes for the problems and suggests people check in with the status page for any further updates.
This is the second time this week that a major cloud server provider has experienced a long service interruption. On Christmas Eve, Amazon Web Services had server clusters in Northern Virginia go down for the better part of a day. The problems affected many millions of Netflix customers, who were unable to access the streaming video service from a number of devices. So far, Amazon has not revealed any details on what happened with its servers during Christmas.
Source: Windows Azure status page