Azure outage in central US brings European Microsoft customers to their knees

Outage has lasted four hours, and counting...

A Microsoft Azure outage on servers in the central US has caused global repercussions, with a number of European customers heavily affected.

The outage seems to have lasted around four hours, since approximately midday today, with tweets to the effect of various services starting to break down.

At its height, the fault was affecting API management, Web apps, Service Bus and SQL database services in the central US region, with service issues in Azure DNS affected globally.

Microsoft's Azure status page is now just reporting SQL database still affected in the central US region.

As is often the case, however, users were noticing a seemingly distinct disconnect between Microsoft's messages, with Azure Twitter feeds and status pages seeming to disagree on the speed of recovery.

As it stands, Azure outages are now becoming a fairly common occurrence, with several "partial service disruption" events in 2015 causing all manner of anguish as customers were unable to log in to Office 365, as its front end login service is controlled directly by Azure.

Mimecast, who offer email security and are constantly monitoring Microsoft's Azure and other cloud services, were on-hand to offer Computing some comment, courtesy of David Hood, cyber resiliency expert:

"Growing dependence on pure Microsoft cloud ecosystems could see events such as today's Azure outage have a dramatic impact on business productivity," said Hood.

"The question to ask ourselves in a cloud-first world is what is our cyber resilience strategy for when Azure, Office 365 or another critical cloud service goes offline?
Even in the world of the cloud, organisations need a continuity plan to keep operating when their primary provider becomes unavailable."

In other words - sit tight; things are only going to get worse.