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Reports: Microsoft Cloud Services Hit by Widespread Outage

Microsoft's Windows Azure, Office 365 and Outlook.com services suffered outages on Thursday, according to reports.

Windows Azure in particular experienced a large outage, with Microsoft's Health Dashboard temporarily going blank.

UPDATE: A Microsoft spokesperson indicated late Thursday afternoon that all Windows Azure services were functioning, but there were some online services issues. "Microsoft is aware of issues involving cloud and online services and we are investigating the cause," the spokesperson said. "We can confirm that these issues were not caused by Windows Azure. We will keep our customers updated as information becomes available. The service interruption that affected Windows Azure Storage was a separate issue and has been resolved. All Windows Azure services are running as normal."

The dashboard was restored later on Thursday afternoon. It indicated that there was one partial service interruption in the North Central U.S. location for Windows Azure.

Historical information in the dashboard showed Windows Azure had performance degradations in terms of compute, networks and storage, all happening on Nov. 21, 2013.

Observations published at Hacker News suggested that Outlook.com was down but still functioning in some places, while Microsoft's Xbox Live service was reported down in the United Kingdom, and CodePlex was reported down in the U.S. Southeast region. One of the posts speculated that it was due to a DNS problem and that Office 365 services also were down.

Windows Azure Twitter posts also affirmed that Office 365 and Xbox Live outages occurred today, as well as an Outlook.com outage. The Register tracked the problem to a DNS service failure, along with the storage issue in the U.S. North Central region, which is still under investigation by Microsoft.

About the Author

Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.

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