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Azure outage hits Western Europe

Microsoft’s recently revamped public cloud has suffered a major failure in Western Europe
Written by Jack Clark, Contributor

Microsoft's Azure cloud has fallen over in Western Europe.

The outage to the service's Compute technology, which began around lunchtime UK time on Thursday, knocked out service for customers provisioning virtual servers from datacentres in Western Europe.

"We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region," Microsoft wrote in a post to its status page at 11:09am UTC (12:09pm BST). "We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation."

An hour later Microsoft said it was "still troubleshooting this issue". There have been no further updates at the time of writing. 

Though Microsoft does not disclose the locations of its Azure datacentres, it is understood that it operates a major facility in the Dublin area, Ireland, as does Amazon Web Services.

In the past, outages like this have been caused by problems with utility suppliers and on-site generators. However, a spokesperson for Irish utility ESB told ZDNet on Thursday that there were no known issues in the Dublin area.
Update
Microsoft has brought Windows Azure Compute in West Europe back online. 
"Storage accounts and running applications were not impacted throughout the duration of the incident," Microsoft wrote on its status page at 1:33PM UTC (2:33PM BST). "We apologise for any inconvenience this caused our customers."

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