Windows Azure Hit by Cloud Outage in Europe

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud computing platform is experiencing a significant service outage in western Europe, the company said this morning. Azure compute services are largely unavailable for customers in the region. Microsoft services for West Europe are supported by a data center in Amsterdam, with a major facility in Dublin delivering Azure services for North Europe.

"We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region," Microsoft said on its Azure service dashboard. "We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers"

The outage began about 11 a.m. UTC (7 a.m. Eastern), and two hours later at 1 p.m. UTC Microsoft said it was still troubleshooting the issue.

UPDATE: "The recent Windows Azure service interruption in the Western Europe sub-region has been resolved," Microsoft reports. "We apologize for any inconvenience this outage may have caused our customers. The duration of the service interruption was approximately 2.5 hours and was resolved at 6:33 AM PDT. Customers who have questions regarding this incident are encouraged to contact Customer Service and Support."

The Windows Azure cloud was hit by downtime on Feb. 29 in a "Leap Day" incident in which a security certificate wasn't expecting the onset of Feb. 29th.