Skip to footer

Windows Azure outage: Leap year was to blame, Microsoft says

Windows Azure weathered a series of outages this week, and Microsoft has traced the whole mess back to the wonky 2012 calendar.

|
Reuters
Windows Azure, Microsoft's cloud computing platform, weathered a series of outages this week.
  • By Matthew Shaer

At around 9 in the evening on Tuesday, a series of outages roiled Windows Azure, a popular cloud computing platform run by Microsoft. According to the Register, the blackouts continued well into the next day, with some users reporting problems as recently as Wednesday evening. It was a "meltdown," to borrow the terminology of one popular tech blog. 

Now, Microsoft says it has sussed out the source of the problem – and it all has to do with the wonky 2012 calendar. 

"While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year," Bill Laing, a Microsoft executive, wrote on the Azure blog yesterday afternoon. "Once we discovered the issue we immediately took steps to protect customer services that were already up and running, and began creating a fix for the issue." 

Laing acknowledged that "some sub-regions and customers are still experiencing issues," but he said Microsoft was working to address the problem. As of yesterday, Azure service had been restored to the "majority" of customers, Laing added. 

Not that all users were easily comforted. IDG highlights today a series of complaints on the Azure forum, including this one, from an especially dyspeptic customer: "I can't imagine the damage this has done to companies with large scale customers. I mean we have chosen Windows Azure due to the redundancy... How can we explain this to our customers?"

As Charles Babcock of Information Week noted, the outages also served as further evidence of the occasional instability of the cloud.  

"This incident is a reminder that the best practices of cloud computing operations are still a work in progress, not an established science. And while prevention is better than cure, infrastructure-as-a-service operators may not know everything they need to about these large-scale environment," Babcock wrote. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Windows Azure outage: Leap year was to blame, Microsoft says
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0301/Windows-Azure-outage-Leap-year-was-to-blame-Microsoft-says
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe