Microsoft Azure outage hits worldwide FTP users

Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform suffered an outage yesterday, affecting thousands of customers in North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, East Asia, East US and West US sub-region.

Problems were reported when Azure’s status dashboard highlighted problems and Microsoft responded saying errors were appearing when manual actions to perform swap deployment operations on its cloud services were administered.

Swap deployment allows services to be deployed on Microsoft’s cloud. Although there are two options for deploying these services – a staging environment and a production environment, the swap deployment operations are used to switch between them.

Because the swap deployment operations were down, the server was unable to switch between the two environments.

Although files couldn’t be uploaded to sites using FTP, sites were able to publish content using Web Deploy or Git. Seventeen hours after the outage was reported, Microsoft suggested users delay performing swap deployment operations until the system was up and running again.

An official Microsoft statement said, “We are taking all necessary steps to mitigate this incident for the affected hosted services as soon as possible.”

Further problems were discovered when the dashboard showed management problems with the Azure Compute cloud.

All services are now showing as fully up and running according to the Windows Azure Dashboard.

UPDATE: Microsoft issued the following statement this evening. "As of 03:45AM Pacific (10:45 UK time), the partial interruption affecting Windows Azure Compute has been resolved. Running applications and compute functionality was unaffected throughout the interruption. Only the Swap Deployment operations were impacted for a small number of customers. Defined simply, Swap Deployment is a virtual IP address swap between the staging and production deployment environments for a service (ie moving from test/dev into production). As a precaution, we advised customers to delay Swap Deployment operations until the issue was resolved. All services to impacted accounts have been restored."