Microsoft Azure suffers prolonged outage

Azure the latest cloud service to crash

Microsoft's Azure cloud is the latest public cloud service to suffer a prolonged outage. It follows two major crashes affecting Amazon's cloud in the space of a month, and recent downtime at Salesforce.com.

The outages highlight the fragility of cloud computing and how software and services built around cloud computing are frequently only as reliable as their weakest links – which are in the hands of large and sometimes unresponsive companies.

Microsoft this morning posted the following apology on its Windows Azure dashboard:

"We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers."

However, the company claimed that the outage was resolved by early afternoon. And later posted the following:

"We apologise for any inconvenience this outage may have caused our customers. The duration of the service interruption was approximately 2.5 hours and was resolved at 6:33 AM PDT [Pacific daylight time]. Customers who have questions regarding this incident are encouraged to contact customer service and support."

Azure had previously gone down in March, when it suffered a 'leap day' outage, knocking the UK government's Cloudstore service offline.

Azure currently boasts that it stores more than four trillion objects – more than quadrupling in size in the space of a year.

Indeed, Microsoft's raw numbers indicate that its cloud is more popular than Amazon's, although Azure underpins Microsoft's SkyDrive and Office 365 services, while Amazon's cloud is typically used for third-party application development.