“We continue to investigate issues in our services impacting all regions. The underlying issue seems to be a datacenter cooling outage in South Central US which is impacting all services in a specific part of the datacenter.” It is unclear if the outage is affecting Azure Active Directory, Azure Bot Service, and VSTS globally or just within a specific region. The Azure Status page says the problem has been mitigated, which suggests the service should be back up soon. “Engineers have isolated an issue with cooling in one part of the data center, which caused a localized spike in temperature, as the preliminary root-cause, which has now been mitigated. Automated data center procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect when temperatures hit a specified threshold and critical hardware entered a structured power down process. Engineers are now in the process of restoring power to affected devices as part of the ongoing mitigation process.”
Downstream Problems
Despite the apparent mitigation, the services remain down several ours after the outage was first confirmed. Of course, this is a typical scenario. While an issue can be solved, the downstream problems an outage caused can be harder to solve. We guess Microsoft is shoring up the service before going back to live status. That may take a few more hours, so be sure to keep an eye on the Azure Status page for a notice.
