The screen shot says it all – as I type Microsoft Azure is suffering from an outage, possibly caused by an expired SSL certificate. Services across the globe are completely down with limited visibility into why and when they will be back up. The Azure service dashboard (hosted on AWS or Rackspace one assumes) is showing that:

Storage is currently experiencing a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate. HTTP traffic is not impacted. We are validating the recovery options before implementing them. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers. Status of affected services will be updated in  the table below.

Have no doubt – this is completely and utterly unacceptable performance from a startup, let alone someone calling themselves an enterprise cloud vendor. Heads should, and absolutely must, roll because of this.

Completely unacceptable Microsoft, I’m disappointed.

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Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

6 Comments
  • This is an incredible oversight – it reminds of the old English nursery rhyme:

    l

    For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
    For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
    For want of a horse the rider was lost.
    For want of a rider the message was lost.
    For want of a message the battle was lost.
    For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
    And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

  • Well, who said all this cloud stuff was going to be easy anyway? I think this was the second mishap Microsoft Azure has experienced with certificates. Last February Windows Azure experienced a leap year date change bug that caused certificate “issues” on Windows Azure. As one of the newest players in warehouse-scale cloud computing environments, Microsoft is apparently still going up the learning curve.

  • The text at the forefront of the home page on the Azure site states: “A rock-solid cloud platform for blue-sky thinking”. Which is now, arguably, factually incorrect.

    The question on my mind as an IT manager is this: Who’s butt gets kicked? Is it me for selecting a cloud solution? Is it the cloud vendor? Is it a 3rd party, such as a certificate authority?

    There is a shakedown required, and events like this will bring it about, hopefully sooner rather than later.

  • I see the daggers are out yet again from those who have no experience operating a massive environment such as at MS Azure…. Seriously it is easy to throw the daggers of outrighteousness when you are on the bench (or behind a tv screen shouting at the players). Whoever said technology was foolproof or human proof was/is a fool.

  • You guys have apparently never heard of an Amazon outage.

  • ruh roh

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