Over the past 10 years, Microsoft Azure has experienced a number of notable outages that have impacted various services and regions. In early 2023, a three-hour outage caused by network issues led to the loss of access to core M365 offerings such as Teams, 365, and Outlook. In September 2018, severe weather in San Antonio, Texas, caused a voltage spike and cooling issue affecting 40 Azure services. In September 2017, an accidental activation of a firefighting gas led to seven hours of service failures. A cooling system failure in March 2017 disrupted Azure cloud services in Japan, while a configuration change in November 2014 caused an outage affecting 20 services globally.
Multiple incidents in August 2014 affected various regions, including US Central, US East, US East 2, and Europe North, impacting cloud services, SQL databases, virtual machines, and more. In June 2014, disruptions to online services, including Lync Online and Exchange Online, left users without email access. On launch day for Xbox One in November 2013, Azure services experienced storage and network issues that affected the North Central region of the US. In October 2013, management issues prevented customers from performing functions on Azure-hosted websites.
In February 2013, an expired SSL certificate led to a crash in the Windows Azure storage cloud platform, resulting in service credits being issued by Microsoft. In July 2012, a misconfigured network device caused Azure Compute service unavailability in parts of Europe for over two hours. A “leap year” bug in February 2012 affected the Windows Azure cloud, causing an eight-hour outage for North American users. In August 2011, major power outages in Dublin affected Microsoft and Amazon data centers, initially thought to be caused by lightning strikes.
These incidents demonstrate the challenges of maintaining and operating cloud services at scale, highlighting the potential impact on businesses and users that rely on Microsoft Azure for critical applications. As Microsoft continues to improve its infrastructure and processes, it aims to minimize the risk of future outages and ensure a more reliable experience for its customers.
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