Microsoft’s Azure cloud service went down this week, taking out the UK government’s CloudStore and disrupting many businesses in the process. The failure “appears” to have been triggered by extra day in the leap year, according to Microsoft.
The disruption to Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing service, lasted for up to 23 hours and affected customers around the world.
“While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year,” wrote Bill Laing, Microsoft’s corporate VP of server and cloud wrote on a company blog.
Laing wrote that the issue had been discovered at 17:45 pm PST on Tuesday, February 28th, (01:45 on Wednesday, February 29th GMT). Writing 23 hours laster, at 16:46 pm PST yesterday, he revealed that “some sub-regions and customers are still experiencing issues and as a result of these issues they may be experiencing a loss of application functionality”.
The UK government’s new cloud service procurement portal CloudStore, which is hosted on Azure, was confirmed as being offline at 12:20 pm GMT, but was back in action by 17:40 pm GMT.
Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte, a cloud storage provider which offers a hybrid cloud solution that helps eliminate downtime for businesses, said: The outage that occurred today with Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform can be crippling and cost millions if not billions of dollars, but more importantly highlights the down side of a pure cloud strategy in the enterprise.
“While we certainly don’t relish these moments, the downtime can be significantly mitigated if organizations were to adopt a hybrid cloud strategy. By maintaining a behind the firewall presence and syncing that to the public cloud, companies are creating an insurance policy just for these situations.
“At the same time they can keep downtime to a minimum and insure their employees are as productive as possible in an emergency situation like this. Hybrid cloud is the smartest path to a productive workforce for today’s enterprise,” Jain added.
Read the official statement from Microsoft here
