Eleven-hour Microsoft Azure outage hits Northern Europe region

North Europe Azure outage blamed on datacentre "temperature issue" - but customers are still complaining this morning

Microsoft's Azure cloud went down for five hours last night, disrupting the platform's storage and networking systems. The outage last from around 5.45pm to 4.30am.

However, many customers were still reporting issues this morning, despite Azure Support claiming that its engineers had "mitigated the issue in North Europe and impacted services should be recovered at this time". That was tweeted at around 6.30am, but by just before midday customers have still been complaining about problems.

According to Microsoft, the outage lasted from 5.44pm yesterday afternoon to 4.30am when "customers using Azure services in North Europe may have experienced connection failures when attempting to access resources hosted in the region.

"Customers leveraging a subset of Azure services may have experienced residual impact for a sustained period post-mitigation of the underlying issue. We are communicating with these customers directly in their Management Portal."

The root cause, it added, was down to "an underlying temperature issue in one of the datacentres in the region [that] triggered an infrastructure alert, which in turn caused a structured shutdown of a subset of storage and network devices in this location to ensure hardware and data integrity".

Engineers addressed the temperature issue, the status update added, and performed a structured recovery of the affected devices and the affected downstream services.

Nevertheless, many customers are still experiencing difficulties, with some complaining of lost business running into millions. Peter Jensbol, Azure Hosting and Operations Manager at Wizdom Intranet in Denmark, for example, suggested that his organisation had more than 40 customers unable to use the company's services.

Microsoft's ‘North Europe' region is based out of Ireland, which has been enjoying warm, but not exactly tropical, weather this week.