PaaS + IaaS

'Unhealthy' Azure Portal instances in UK West take a little lie-down over lunchtime

A brief nap can do wonders when you're under the weather

Lindsay Clark Tue 20 Apr 2021 // 14:25 UTC

Microsoft engineers scrambled to improve the health of Azure on Tuesday after the cloud service started looking a bit green around the gills.

"We observed a subset of Azure Portal instances in the UK West became unhealthy, causing intermittent issues accessing the Azure Portal," Microsoft told users seeking to understand the 503 message they had just received.

The problem, which first manifested around noon UK time, was fixed shortly after 2pm. Little comfort that was to the valiant support people who suffered the lunchtime disruption.

Azure Portal 503

Azure's status page at the time

They took to Twitter, spouting complaints like: "FFS @Azure, why's your portal down? How am I meant to manage resources in Azure?"

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Register: "A subset of customers reported difficulty accessing the Azure Portal earlier today. There was no impact to customer services, and Portal access was quickly restored to normal."

Azure Portal is not the only Microsoft product to have suffered a bout of ill-health during 2021.

A tsunami of DNS queries took out a host of services, from Xbox Live to Teams, for some netizens for about an hour on April Fools' Day. In March, the Azure Active Directory service broke, preventing affected users from logging into and authenticating with the cloud giant's services. The incidents followed 2020 outages including multiple problems for Office 365 subscribers.

They say laughter is the greatest medicine. It isn't, but it does pass the time while you're waiting for Microsoft to return its services to what passes for healthy normality. ®

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