Microsoft Azure suffers huge outage affecting websites and Office 365

Northern and Western European customers could still be affected by glitch

Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure has bit hit with a fault that has taken many third-party sites offline, and has also interfered with Microsoft's Office 365 online apps.

Azure had problems from 00:52 GMT across the world, with the Microsoft Azure status page stating that some customers would see partial service interruption if they were using storage, virtual machines, websites and a host of other Azure services.

"Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services," a Microsoft spokesperson said at the time.

"We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible."

According to the Microsoft Azure status page at the time of writing, the Azure core platform components are all working properly. Microsoft mitigated many of the issues but it is still investigating issues that are impacting a subset of virtual machines customers in North Europe and West Europe.

The latest outage will come as a blow to the software giant in its bid to rival Amazon and others in the cloud computing space.

Azure was launched by Microsoft back in 2009 and has had several outages to date, including two in 2012. The platform went down in March of that year when it suffered a ‘leap day' outage, knocking the UK government's CloudStore service offline.

Then in July 2012, it suffered a prolonged outage in Western Europe which affected access to hosted services in that region.

The outages, along with two major crashes affecting its rival Amazon's cloud in the space of a month left many customers questioning the reliability of cloud computing.

Microsoft later stated that the July outage was because of a "safety valve" configuration error.