Microsoft Azure faceplants in Norway, taking government services with it

Locals see red as public cloud's service health dashboard shows green

Norwegians fell victim to a prolonged Microsoft Azure outage today, which impacted businesses and took down multiple government websites delivering online services to citizens.

According to Down Detector, the problems first showed up at 9am local time and lasted for more than three hours, though The Reg could find no official indication on the Azure health dashboard that the services were offline – and we're not the only ones.

"Our engineers are currently working on this issue," Microsoft told one user on X just before lunch, "and communications should have been sent to your service health dashboard in the Azure portal. Are you experiencing any recovery at this time, as we seem to be seeing signs of recovery?"

The response perhaps wasn't what Microsoft expected. "Why is everything green on your Azure status page for Europe for all resources when you obviously have serious issues with multiple types of resources?" a user asked.

Problems with Azure were confined to one region, Microsoft confirmed, "and the impact has been identified, so we are sending targeted communications to everyone affected via their service health dashboard," the company rep on X replied.

Cosmos DB was down and out in Norway East. For others, web apps were down, storage accounts weren't working, and Azure Virtual Desktop was kaput too. Not all customers were affected, it seems.

The Norwegian government's website, Regjeringen.no, was out of action for some hours.

Viewers saw this when the Regjeringen.no page went down

This site provides information about the Office of the Prime Minister, ministries, historical data, and serves up public documents. Or it did until Azure fell over.

The Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs was similarly out for the count.

It's the convenience of cloud services that makes them so great, apart from when an outage occurs, then things aren't so great after all. These things happen and ideally customers would like a valid technical explanation and an estimated time of recovery. Both of those facets were sorely missing today.

We asked Microsoft to comment and a spokesperson said: "Let me look into this for you now and I'll let you know if we have anything to share." ®