X
Tech

G-Cloud CloudStore knocked offline by Azure outage

The Government's online application store, CloudStore, was knocked offline for around five hours on Wednesday due to an outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform-as-a-service.The site, which launched in mid-February, is exclusively hosted on Azure and fell victim to a disruption that hit businesses in the US and Europe.
Written by Jack Clark, Contributor

The Government's online application store, CloudStore, was knocked offline for around five hours on Wednesday due to an outage on Microsoft's Windows Azure platform-as-a-service.

The site, which launched in mid-February, is exclusively hosted on Azure and fell victim to a disruption that hit businesses in the US and Europe.

The Cabinet Office hinted that the disruption may lead it to use other clouds, when asked by ZDNet UK.

"We are reviewing the operational requirements of the CloudStore on an ongoing basis," a Cabinet Office spokesman told ZDNet UK on Thursday. "Considerations of this [multi-cloud] sort are part of this process."

"Power outage on Microsoft Azure means #cloudstore is temporarily unavailable," the Government wrote on its G-Cloud twitter account at 12:11pm on Wednesday. "Patch being applied so will update when normal service resumed."

The site was restored around four hours later, even though disruption to the overall Azure system lasted through the night.

"Microsoft are moving us to a different Azure install and are confident we'll be up and running again by 4pm," the G-Cloud tweeted at 3.35pm. By 4:37pm the site was back online.

A Cabinet Office spokesman couldn't give details on how service was restored and Microsoft did not respond to requests for further information.

"The cloud is a system like any system," the spokesman said, "though we'd worked to put the best resilience things in place, things were going to happen... CloudStore could still be contacted by phone or email."

Editorial standards