Microsoft Azure Suffers Partial Outage Worldwide

Microsoft Azure suffered another outage on Tuesday evening, but the cloud computing platform and infrastructure offering was reported as being fully functional again by 8:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday.

According to the Azure status website, “Starting at 18 Nov, 2014 16:34 UTC a subset of customers using Traffic Manager may experience latency while attempting to create or modify their Traffic Manager profiles. Customers may see 20 to 30 minutes for their profiles to become effective. We have identified a potential root cause, and are working to mitigate the issue. The next update will be provided in 60 minutes.”

The outage was experienced by customers worldwide, and it knocked not only many customers, as well as their websites and cloud services offline, but also the entire MSN web portal. The connectivity issue affected multiple Azure services, but Microsoft aimed to restore service as quickly as possible.

Forbes called the time for an update from the first notification a “travesty,” noting the services being affected were critical to customers. Meanwhile, the dry British humor of the BBC found the timing “unfortunate” considering Microsoft had only hours before screened Azure advertisements in the United Kingdom during a footie match.

Significant cloud disruptions of this nature don’t help channel partners in assuring their customers — or potential customers — that the cloud is secure and accessible, even though cloud infrastructure services frequently have better uptime track records than traditional on-premise IT.

It’s been a tough year for Azure, though. According to CloudEndure, Azure service interruptions have been on the rise, with the public cloud services experiencing an 800 percent increase in service interruptions in the second quarter of the year.