Microsoft blames performance update for Azure outage
Microsoft Azure was hit by an 11-hour outage on November 19, in United States, Europe and certain parts of Asia. The outage impacted multiple services offered through the cloud platform, including Azure Storage, Virtual Machines, Service Bus, and Visual Studio, just to name a few. The culprit? Microsoft links a performance update to the mishap.
The performance update, which is meant for Azure Storage, "had been [successfully] tested over several weeks", says Microsoft, on a small subset of targets, prior to being applied. However, during the general roll-out, Microsoft noticed an issue which resulted in an "inability for the [storage blob] front ends to take on further traffic, which in turn caused other services built on top to experience issues".
Microsoft says that it fixed the issue for most of its Azure customers, by rolling back the changes, but some may still be affected. "I want to first sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused", says Microsoft Azure Team CVP Jason Zander.
Microsoft says that it will take some steps to ensure that such issues will not arise again in the future, like ensuring stricter deployment standards, improving recovery methods and improving Service Health Dashboard Infrastructure and protocols.
At the time of writing this article, there are more than 45 comments to the blog post Microsoft used to give details on the outage. Many commenters are dissatisfied with the way Microsoft handled the roll-out of the performance update, communicating with impacted users afterwards, and the way Service Health Dashboard Infrastructure related the statuses during the outage.
Some commenters are saying that they are asking Microsoft for compensation, as the software giant is claimed to have failed to meet its SLA (Service Level Agreement) guarantees due to the 11-hour outage.
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