Want to provision a new VM on Azure? Get in line

UK West and South regions suffering from capacity issues

Multiple Microsoft customers have for the past nineteen hours been unable to provision new virtual machines in Azure's UK West and UK South regions.

Although there has been no formal notification on the Azure status page, The Register has seen a copy of a Microsoft issue summary report indicating issues since Wednesday morning.

According to the document, some customers "may receive error notifications when deploying new A, Av2, Dv2, F, Dv2_Promo Virtual Machines series" in UK West, "starting Virtual Machines – with the same SKUs – which are currently in a 'Stopped (Deallocated)' state may also return errors". And "an alert for Virtual Machines and Virtual Machine Scale Sets in UK South is being investigated".

"I'm shocked to see Microsoft's response so far and the Azure service status claims there is nothing wrong," the customer, speaking on condition of anonymity, told The Register.

According to the report, the availability of currently running VMs is not affected.

"It has all the telltale signs of a capacity issue," added the customer, who was unable to reallocate new VMs that deallocated overnight.

Andy Burgess, managing director of network solutions firm Burconix, told us the situation was "not great" because the firm runs its phone system in Azure.

"We had no phones yesterday," he said, "and thought it will be back on by the morning... but still nothing."

The firm normally de-provisions Azure VMs overnight to save cost and restart them in the morning at 6.30am. But it has had to redirect SIP voice over IP services to a public switched telephone network.

Some customers have taken to Twitter to complain about the lack of new VM provisioning.

not alone, its as if they've run out of capacity..

— Alex Bevan (@ItsAlexBevan) November 8, 2017

Yeah just tested again and still no joy. Can't resize or even redeploy.

— .T. (@T1163) November 8, 2017

Yeah, I'm still staying tuned. It's been down for over 24 hours now. Any indication of how long it's going to take to fix would be appreciated. This issue has dented our confidence quite a bit.

— ✧･ nige ･✧ (@nigelainscoe) November 9, 2017

Earlier this year, we revealed that Azure had capacity issues, though the company described it as "quota restraints on new customers".

We contacted Microsoft for comment. ®

Updated to add – 16:25 GMT

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "Some customers in the west and south of the UK have reported difficulties provisioning. We have added capacity and are working with them to address the issue."