Microsoft's Visual Studio Online outage hits users worldwide
Microsoft's Visual Studio Online service has been down since 6:30 a.m. PT/9:30 a.m. ET on August 14.
Visual Studio Online is a collection of developer services based on Team Foundation Server that are running on Azure. Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online in November 2013.
"We are currently investigating an issue that has caused a disruption with the Visual Studio Online service," a company spokesperson said via an e-mailed statement. "The service has been unavailable since 6:30 AM, PT this morning. Microsoft’s DevOps teams are engaged and actively investigating the issue and will provide further updates as soon as it is resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our customers’ patience while working on resolving this issue."
I asked Microsoft officials whether some service degradations happening on Azure today in certain geographies are causing the Visual Studio Online problems. Officials said Azure has nothing to do with the outage; it's due to bugs in the Visual Studio Online code.
The Azure Status Web page shows Visual Studio Online experiencing a "Multi-Region, Full Service Interruption."
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There's further explanation as to what's happening on the Visual Studio Online Service blog in the latest post (made at 12:56 p.m. ET):
"Our DevOPs teams are continuing investigating the issue. Customers would experience login and performance issues while accessing their accounts. The actual root cause is still under investigation, but initial investigation is indicating a contention in our core database seems to be causing blocking and performance issues in the services. Our DevOps teams have identified a couple of mitigation steps and are currently going thru validations. We will provide an update as soon as we have a mitigation in place."
An earlier post said the team was rolling back changes made in the last 24 hours to see if that would help.
Visual Studio Online was down on July 18 for 90 minutes as a result of Azure SQL database issues.
Update (4 p.m. ET): It sounds like Visual Studio Online is starting to come back. An update from the Visual Studio Online Service blog from 3:40 p.m. ET/12:40 p.m. PT:
"We have applied additional mitigation steps. Now the service performance has started to come back to normal. We'll continue to monitor the service and resolve the issue fully. Thanks for your patience."