Microsoft Azure cloud suffers first crash

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."