Two of Microsoft's Azure public cloud services went down for more than two hours Monday for customers in the central U.S., due to what the software giant described as a "network infrastructure issue."
The outage, which began just after 1 p.m. Central time, affected customers of Microsoft's Azure Virtual Machines (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) and Azure Cloud Services (Platform-as-a-Service) offerings, the Redmond, Wash.-based vendor said in a bulletin on its its Azure Status webpage.
Microsoft described the issue as a "partial service interruption" and said the service had been restored to full availability as of 3:19 CT. Microsoft didn't indicate how many customers were affected by the issue.
[Related: VMware Tells Salespeople vSphere VMs Running On Azure Is A Pipe Dream]
In a separate bulletin, Microsoft said a "subset of customers" using Azure Active Directory, Access Control, SQL, Websites, HDInsight, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Redis Cache and Stream Analytics "may have encountered errors" as a result of the glitch that affected Virtual Machines and Cloud Services.
Cloud outages are fairly common and most customers and vendor partners believe they're part of the growing pains the cloud industry is going through on the road to becoming a utility.
That said, if you're a Microsoft partner hosting critical infrastructure on Azure, outages can have a real impact on your business.
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