Microsoft techies are trying to recover storage nodes for a “small” number of customers following a “power issue” on October 20 that triggered Azure service disruptions and ruined breakfast for those wanting to use hosted virtual machines or SQL DB.
The degradation began at 0731 UTC on Friday when Microsoft spotted the unspecified power problem, which affected infrastructure in one Availability Zone in the West Europe region. As such, businesses using VMs, Storage, App Service, or Cosmos and SQL DB suffered interruptions.
So what caused this unplanned downtime session? Microsoft says in an incident report on its Azure status history page: “Due to an upstream utility disturbance, we moved to generator power for a section of one datacenter at approximately 0731 UTC. A subset of those generators supporting that section failed to take over as expected during the switch over from utility power, resulting in the impact.”
Engineers managed to restore power again at around 0800 UTC and the impacted infrastructure began to clamber back online again. When the networking and storage plumbing recovered, compute scale units were brought into service, and for the “vast majority” the Azure services were accessible again from 0915 UTC.
Yet not everyone was up and running smoothly, Microsoft admitted.
“A small amount of storage nodes needs to be recovered manually, leading to delays in recovery for some services and customers. We are working to recover these nodes and will continue to communicate to these impacted customers directly via the Service Health blade in the Azure Portal.”
Source: Microsoft admits ‘power issue’ downed Azure in West Europe • The Register
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