Microsoft resolves two-hour Azure outage in Europe

Microsoft says it has resolved an outage of its Azure cloud computing service that impacted some European users for more than two hours on Thursday.

Microsoft has released scant details as to what caused the outage, but the company first reported the issue shortly after 11 a.m. ET and announced on its Azure service blog its resolution shortly after 1:30 p.m. The company says the disruption impacted hosted services, but not storage accounts or running applications.

ANALYSIS: Dealing with outages -- are we ready?

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In March, Microsoft offered credits to customers impacted by the "Leap Day" Azure outage, which occurred on Feb. 29 this year. A software bug exposed code that did not account for this year's Leap Day, which only occurs every four years and caused the system to believe it was failing. That issue took more than 13 hours to resolve.

READ: Microsoft offers credits for 'Leap Day' Azure outage

Today's Azure issue was just one of several outages that occurred on Thursday. Google Talk users lamented on Twitter about an outage that impacted "a majority of users," the company said. Disgruntled chatters were silenced on the social media network when Twitter itself fell victim to an outage around midday.

Other cloud providers have suffered outages in recent months, including SalesForce.com and Amazon Web Services.

Network World staff writer Brandon Butler covers cloud computing and social collaboration. He can be reached at BButler@nww.com and found on Twitter at @BButlerNWW.