Microsoft is battling a huge outage that has hit its cloud platform Windows Azure. The downtime has affected customers all over the world and first surfaced during the early hours of the day, UK time.
The power outage suffered by Microsoft has resulted in a number of websites disappearing from the web, including the government’s recently-launched CloudStore.
The platform first began suffering problems in the early hours of this morning, which Microsoft quickly identified and fixed. However late this morning the service once again went down, and is still down at the time of writing.
Microsoft said the initial error was caused by a "cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT", suggesting the problem could be connected with the leap year date.
The company had been doing a good job of keeping customers up to date on the service outage via its Windows Azure Service Status Dashboard. However at the time of writing that was also unavailable.
According to reports from some news outlets that have managed to access the page, Microsoft has identified the error and is rolling out fixes gradually.
One service affected is the government’s CloudStore, its recently-launched app store for cloud offerings. It forms part of the G-Cloud initiative
A message on its official Twitter feed read: "Power outage on Microsoft azure means #cloudstore is temporarily unavailable. Patch being applied so will update when normal service resumed." That was shortly after midday today and no further information has been offered.
Microsoft had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
UPDATE, 4.50pm: Another Tweet from CloudStore says the service is "up and running again", after Microsoft moved the site to a "different Azure install".
The Azure Service Dashboard is up and down at the moment, as is the main Windows Azure website.
There is still no word from Microsoft on what is causing the continued problems or how long they are expected to last.
UPDATE, 5.00pm: Microsoft has released a statement to CBR: "On February 28th, 2012 at 5:45 PM PST Microsoft became aware of an issue impacting Windows Azure service management in a number of regions. Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers. Some customers in 3 sub regions – North Central US, South Central and North Europe – remain affected. Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible We will update the Service Dashboard, hourly until this incident is resolved."
UPDATE: A new blog from Microsoft has suggested that it was indeed a leap year bug that brought down its Windows Azure service.
