News
Azure Outage Rolls Through Europe, India
A significant disruption of Microsoft's Azure cloud services has affected a large number of customers in Europe and India, and it's really trying the patience of developers using Visual Studio Team Services, with only partial use of services back online as of Friday afternoon.
- By Michael Domingo
- 09/09/2016
Once in a while, a reminder smacks developers right in the face that cloud services are only reliable to a degree. That reminder came early Friday for a number of customers using Microsoft's Azure cloud services in Europe and India, when a significant Azure disruption took down services in those regions. The services have hit developers using Visual Studio Team Services hard, with only partial use of services back online as of Friday afternoon.
Seattle, Wash.-based tech news site GeekWire.com reports on an extensive rundown of the events that precipitated the outage. "The problems started in western and northern Europe and later in the morning spread to India," writes Dan Richman, in his report. "As of 10:02 a.m. Pacific Time, some customers were tweeting that the problems had been resolved, though no resolution was reflected on Microsoft's blogs or on a status-reporting site."
Richman reported that the outage appears to have started around 8 a.m. Pacific time. Chris Roberts, a developer in York, UK, was among a handful of initial posters on Twitter to experience the outage: "Are you having app service or SQL database problems (Western Europe)? Nothing on dashboard yet @AzureSupport #azure"
Affected customers can check Azure status at the Azure support page here. As of this writing, that page shows that most services appear to be back online.
Meanwhile, developers using Visual Studio Team Services continue to have to wait for full VSTS accessibility.
According to a post from Microsoft's Sri Harsha on the VSTS services blog: "We have applied additional mitigation steps on our end after the Azure West Europe incident was resolved. At this point, users can get to their VS Team Services accounts in West Europe and perform regular operations, but custom extensions will continue to face issues. Our engineers are working hard to completely resolve this issue."
The outage comes on the heels of Microsoft completing work on adding Azure datacenters in the UK on Wednesday.
About the Author
Michael Domingo is a long-time software publishing veteran, having started up and managed several developer publications for the Clipper compiler, Microsoft Access, and Visual Basic. He's also managed IT pubs for 1105 Media, including Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine and Virtualization Review before landing his current gig as Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief. Besides his publishing life, he's a professional photographer, whose work can be found by Googling domingophoto.