Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform is back up and running this morning following an outage that hit the Western Europe region.
The service was down for around two and a half hours on Thursday afternoon, with little information from Microsoft about what caused the issue. The Azure service status page simply said an "availability issue" across Western Europe was impacting access to "hosted services in this region."
When the service was restored Microsoft simply confirmed that Azure was back up and running and that "storage accounts and running applications were not impacted" during the downtime. No further information has been given.
This is not the first time Azure has suffered performance issues. In February this year the service was knocked offline for four hours by a bug caused by the leap year. The company explained the issue was apparently caused by "a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year."
Earlier in February Microsoft had announced a $130m investment in its Dublin data centre to help the company deal with the increase in demand for its cloud services.
Yesterday was not a good day for tech infrastructure as Twitter was also knocked offline for around two hours, as was the Google Talk instant messaging platform. The government’s CloudStore also disappeared from the web yesterday. CloudStore was also knocked offline in February by the Azure outage, although that was not the cause this time, CloudStore confirmed.
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