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Topic: Outage

Microsoft Azure cloud suffers first crash

Summary: Microsoft's pre-beta Azure Services Platform went dark for a period of 22 hours on Friday and Saturday, leaving a "large number of deployments" slow to start or restart, or simply hanging in "stopped" or "initializing" states, reports The Register (UK).That puts Microsoft in good company with Amazon Web Services and Flexiscale, which have also suffered massive outages since launch.

Andrew Nusca

By for Between the Lines |

Microsoft's pre-beta Azure Services Platform went dark for a period of 22 hours on Friday and Saturday, leaving a "large number of deployments" slow to start or restart, or simply hanging in "stopped" or "initializing" states, reports The Register (UK).

That puts Microsoft in good company with Amazon Web Services and Flexiscale, which have also suffered massive outages since launch.

One early adopter, Oakleaf Systems, reported that its Table and Blob Services demos were offline.

It is not yet clear what caused the outage. Since Microsoft is participating in this week's Mix conference in Las Vegas -- where it will be encouraging developers to adopt Azure -- it's unlikely that it will issue a report until the conference closes.

In a post in the MSDN forums, Azure team member Steve Marx said he expected a root cause analysis would be conducted to "understand exactly what went wrong and what we need to do to ensure it doesn't happen again. Once we have that sorted out, I'll put together a summary."

However, he "probably won't get that out until after the Mix conference."

Topics: Outage, Microsoft

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37 comments
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  • at least the users did not see BSOD

    that's a big step forward for M$...good job!
    Linux Geek
    Reply Vote

    • Wouldn't that be a BCOD (Blue Cloud Of Death)?

      After all, we are talking about "Cloud Computing" and a failure like this (when in production) would be bad for business (see peoples reaction to when SalesForce.com or Google has a failure). Also, the "BCOD" concept would be better applied (as in, a dark cloud).
      B.O.F.H.
      Reply Vote

      • When in production

        I will agree with you. When it hasn't even hit the beta milestone I don't have a problem with it going down as that's the entire point of a large scale beta. (or alpha)
        LiquidLearner
        Reply Vote

      • How about El Ni?o? [nt]

        [nt]
        olePigeon
        Reply Vote

  • "Quality MS Software"

    Yet another reason you don't bet your company on MS.

    If you do, you deserve to be fired.

    MS has no place in high performance computing.
    itguy08
    Reply Vote

    • Right, go with Amazon Web Services or Flexiscale

      Google, et cetera. Yes, it sounds as though Microsoft's is on par with the others.

      MS does have a place in high performance computing.

      You just do not have any place in a serious discussion.
      GuidingLight
      Reply Vote

    • Here, I fixed it for you

      [i][b]Pre-Beta[/b] MS [b]software[/b] has no place in high performance [b]mission critical[/b] computing.[/i]

      You did realize that Azure is not a paid for, final product yet, right? While people would be foolish to spin this as a [b]good[/b] thing, it certainly is better to have this crash now than have it crash after it goes live. If they can find the root cause of the crash and fix it then at least this crash will have cost people $0 and will have prevented a crash in the future when people [b]are[/b] paying for it. And [b]that[/b] is a good thing!
      NonZealot
      Reply Vote

      • NZ, WHEN will you learn...

        Logic and facts do not quell FUD flames. Using logic and facts on these flamers is about as fruitless as communicating with Helen Keller pre-Anne Sullivan. But I admire your stamina.
        MGP2
        Reply Vote

        • ye is the one with real stamina

          He is the one that deserves our admiration. But thanks anyway. :)
          NonZealot
          Reply Vote

          • Yea he really can spew foolishness for extended periods (nt)

            nt
            storm14k
            Reply Vote

          • And you're here because...?

            Birds of a feather?
            MGP2
            Reply Vote

        • MGP2, WHEN will you learn....

          Logic and facts do not EXIST in NonZealots posts. Him using facts is about as common as a Gamma Ray Burst annihilating all life on the planet (about once in a billion years).
          No More Microsoft Software Ever!
          Reply Vote

          • Right...

            So according to your logic, a Gamma Ray Burst has annihilated all life on the planet about 4 times now and the next one is imminent in approximately 400 million years?

            Fat lot of logic and fact is in your posts, eh?
            Core2uu
            Reply Vote

      • Naah you didn't

        I was right the first time.

        MS has no place in high performance computing.
        itguy08
        Reply Vote

  • OMG, I am so shocked.

    Not really.
    BrutalTruth
    Reply Vote

    • ha

      lol
      ingramproductions
      Reply Vote

  • Pre-beta only "as good" as the shipping competition

    Wow. Microsoft's pre-beta software has now stumbled back to similar quality expectations that its competitors release as shipped, final software.

    Shocking.
    KTLA
    Reply Vote

    • The other posters missed that

      Or, by looking at who posted, ignored it. Pre-beta (aka Alpha) release level and it went down for 22 hours. OMG! What a trategy. Unlike Google it will come out of Beta and when it does I have zero doubt it will exceed the five 9's MS is going for.
      LiquidLearner
      Reply Vote

      • It would be very impressive if Microsoft did better than 5 9's

        the five 9's standard (set by an IBM 360 cluster) is 5 minutes down in 365 days. Amazon offers (roughly) 99.95% up time (364.8 days up time). I don't know what Google claims to offer as per up time guarantees. Hopefully there will not be many repeats of this downtime as it goes into (and out of) beta, but if this sort of failure happens during production at least there will be financial restitution (as per the SLA).
        B.O.F.H.
        Reply Vote

  • RE: Microsoft Azure cloud suffers first crash

    Yeah right, MS knows nothing about networks, servers and certainly nothing about "the cloud". I read that they made a massive SINGLE data centre in the USA for their cloud...

    I FELL OFF MY CHAIR AND LAUGHTED FOR HOURS !!

    "The cloud" is all about distributed processing ...

    Give it up MS your days are numbered.

    pdgilligan
    Reply Vote
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