22-Hour Outage for Windows Azure

Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform was offline for 22 hours over the weekend. Windows Azure, which provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host web applications and services in Microsoft’s data center, is currently in technology preview.  The incident began Friday night at about 10:30 pm Pacific time, and was resolved at 8:30 Saturday night.

Windows Azure is housed in Microsoft's huge data center in Quincy, Washington and runs on Dell servers. The pre-release technology preview and beta periods are useful for finding and fixing glitches, but also a time when developers are formulating opinions about the offering. Links via Cloud Security and Oakleaf Systems.