Microsoft's Azure cloud suffers first crash

Evangelize first, report later

Microsoft wanted to offer people the full cloud experience. Well, now it has.

The company's pre-beta Azure Services Platform has joined the likes of Amazon Web Services and Flexiscale with a massive outage - Azure's first.

Azure went dark for a period of 22 hours on Friday and Saturday, leaving a "large number of deployments" slow to start or restart, or simply hanging in "stopped" or "initializing" states.

One such adopter was Oakleaf Systems, whose Table and Blob Services demos were offline.

As of Monday morning, it was not clear what had caused the outage with the company unlikely to publish a report on the incident until after this week's Mix conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Microsoft will be encouraging developers to adopt Azure.

Azure team member Steve Marx said he expected a root cause analysis would be conducted to "understand exactly what went wrong and what we need to do to ensure it doesn't happen again. Once we have that sorted out, I'll put together a summary."

However, he "probably won't get that out until after the Mix conference." ®