Business users of Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure services had a hard time getting their work done Tuesday as the software giant reported widespread outages that resulted from temperatures overheating in one of its data centers.
Microsoft said the problem occurred at a facility in Texas and impacted Azure users in the south-central area of the United States.
According to Microsoft’s Azure Support Twitter feed, “A severe weather event, including lightning strikes,” occurred near the data center that caused a power surge, which impacted the cooling system.
As a result, the facility went into a shutdown process to keep the Azure servers and other data center gear from overheating. Among the services affected by the outage were Microsoft’s Office 365 and Active Directory offerings.
Azure is a set of cloud-based services used for building, testing, deploying and managing applications and services that Microsoft manages through a network of its own data centers. The services include website operation, storage and data networking management. Microsoft Azure competes in the cloud-services business with the likes of Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft’s Azure Support tweeted that engineers had successfully restored power to the data center and had recovered a majority of the network devices affected by the shutdown. The company said “mitigation efforts” were continuing in order to get all of the services involved back up and running.
