Microsoft: Azure outage was due to problematic storage platform upgrade

Wednesday’s large-scale outage on Microsoft’s Azure platform is believed to be due to an attempt to update the cloud service’s storage platform. Microsoft was forced to roll back the update to the Azure Storage service.

Customers in Europe, the United States and part of Asia suffered a major outage on Wednesday that lasted about 11 hours. A number of Microsoft services were also difficult to reach for some time, including Office 365 and Xbox Live.

Initially, the cause of the malfunction was not entirely clear, but Microsoft has now provided more clarity. The Azure platform would have gone down due to a ‘performance update’ to the Azure Storage service, responsible director Jason Zander said. The failure of the Service Health Dashboard and the Azure Management Portal, both dependent on the Storage service, also exacerbated the problems for customers. Microsoft has announced that it plans to roll out updates for Azure in smaller steps from now on and improve recovery procedures to minimize disruptions.