Microsoft’s Azure cloud service had another major global outage today as a result of DNS issues, that impacted access to Office 365 (maybe it should be more realistically called Office 360-ish, give or take a few days of unexpected outages each year) and other services like Teams and Sharepoint.
There’s been a number of other significant outages over the past few months, which doesn’t give a good impression of Microsoft’s cloud reliability.
There was the multifactor access issue in November 2018 that again left users unable to logon for several hours.
In September 2018 there was the ‘weather related incident‘ related to a lightning strike near one of their datacenters in Texas. Although it only impacted Azure data centers in Texas, for some reason this outage had a cascading impact impacting access to Office 365 and related services across the US, with some users unable to access services for at least a day.
In June 2018 there was the datacenter cooling issue that took down access for most of Europe, another outage that lasted several hours.
What’s interesting in all these cases is that an issue impacting an Azure datacenter in a specific regional area impacted access to service across a much wider geographic area. You would think (or hope) there’s some planned level of cross region failover support for Azure services, but maybe there’s not?