Microsoft Azure cloud-computing service suffers serious outages

Microsoft Corp's Azure cloud-computing service, which hosts websites and allows remote storage and management of data, was hit with serious outages yesterday taking its popular MSN web portal offline, Reuters reported.

The company's Azure status page said, the problems started around 5:00 pm Pacific time and have still had not been fully resolved. "We are experiencing a connectivity issue across multiple Azure Services," the page said.

Reuters reported the company was investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services. He added the company was working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible.
 
According to commentators, such outages hurt the company's Azure marketing pitch as cost-effective and reliable alternative to Amazon's competing service called AWS.

Many customers relying on Azure to host websites were hit, including Microsoft itself, whose MSN.com site was inaccessible yesterday.

The last major Azure outage happened in August.

Yesterday's outage seems to have affected customers who had virtual machines in all regions, apart from the brand new data centre in Australia, ubergizmo.com reported.

Users took to social media to express their outrage at the outage, especially when the status page did not denote that anything had gone wrong at least half an hour after the outage began.

Among Microsoft sites were its press center, the Windows Store and Xbox Live. The Xbox Live support page, pointed out that ''social and gaming are limited'', while other functions such as matchmaking, party and chat remained unavailable.