CloudEndure: Azure Service Interruptions Up 800% in Q2

The last few months have been mixed for Microsoft Azure (MSFT). The public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offering has gained significant traction in the market and is now officially holds the No. 2 spot behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), but cases of service disruption are becoming more common.

Following this week’s Azure outage, which affected upwards of 10 Azure services for several hours, CloudEndure released data that indicated the number of service interruptions on Azure had increased by a whopping 800 percent from the first quarter to the second quarter of 2014.

It’s not all bad news. In Q2, Azure experienced 201 service issues, down 22 percent from Q1’s 259 service issues. Those service issues tended to be more severe, though. According to CloudEndure, service interruptions increased nine-fold to 28 from three, and service degradation increased to 131 from 88, representing a 49 percent increase. Service information decreased to 42 from 168, a 75 percent decline.

The alert came from CloudEndure’s PR team on behalf of CEO Ofer Gadish. And it doesn’t look good for Azure, which apparently is suffering from service issues even as it continues to grow its revenue and market share in the IaaS market.

Of the various cloud services available on Azure, the top interrupted services included SQL databases, compute (service management), compute, storage and HDInsight.

Additionally, the Americas West region suffered the most, with the highest number of issues (at 33). Specifically in the case of service interruptions, Europe West had the most (at five).

The downtime earlier this week was the result of interruptions in multiple centers, according to Reuters. It was not the most severe of the Azure outages on record. That honor, as it were, goes to the outage of February 2013.

CloudTech ruminated on the latest outage, noting that Microsoft’s “cloud first, mobile” strategy is working in that Microsoft is gaining on Amazon, but also indicating some bad news around layoffs throughout the company to make that strategy work.