In February, customers of Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service were hit with an outage that lasted for about 10 hours. The cause of the shutdown turned out to be a "leap day" software bug. Microsoft apologized for the downtime and later offered Windows Azure customers a 33 percent credit for their monthly bill.
On Thursday, Windows Azure users in Western Europe found that the service was not operational for about 2 1/2 hours. The servers themselves are located in Dublin, Ireland and in Amsterdam. Microsoft has since posted up a note on its Windows Azure blog site that offered yet another apology as well as a brief explanation on what happened this time:
The service interruption was triggered by a misconfigured network device that disrupted traffic to one cluster in our West Europe sub-region. Once a set device limit for external connections was reached, it triggered previously unknown issues in another network device within that cluster, which further complicated network management and recovery.
The blog post added that Microsoft will release a more detailed explanation on what happened sometime next week. As with the previous outage, the company will offer Azure customers that were affected by the downtime some credit on their next monthly bill.
Source: Windows Azure blog
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