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Thinking of moving to O365 to make your life easier? You Need to Read This!

Gary White- Waterford Technologies Considering moving your archiving solution to O365 so you don’t need to worry about it anymore? It might

Gary White- Waterford Technologies

Considering moving your archiving solution to O365 so you don’t need to worry about it anymore?

It might be worth reconsidering if you want to use services like your email or your website.

Microsoft Azure faults knock websites offline

Users attempting to access SocialSafe and other sites were met with error messages

Faults with Microsoft’s cloud computing platform have knocked many third-party sites offline, as well as disrupting the US firm’s own products.

Microsoft Azure’s status page says problems began at 00:52 GMT on Tuesday 18th Nov across the globe. Its European operations took the longest to fix.

Access to Microsoft’s Office 365 online suite of apps and its Xbox Live gaming facility are among services affected.

The faults could set back the company’s efforts to sell Azure.

Microsoft is attempting to make gains on the market leader, Amazon Web Services, as well as IBM, Google and others offering rival products.

Their pitch is that it is more efficient for companies to rent computing power from a large tech firm than owning and managing their own computer servers or going to a smaller provider.

Azure’s marketing materials say it guarantees that many of its services will be available “99.9%” of the time

“Microsoft is investigating an issue affecting access to some Microsoft services,” said Adrienne Hall, general manager at the company.

“We are working to restore full access to these services as quickly as possible.”

Hours after the initial report of an outage, Microsoft’s own site indicated that some customers were still experiencing problems with access to storage, the operation of their websites and access to analytics tools. 

‘Hugely disruptive’

Azure’s biggest customers include Easyjet, Toyota, Tesco, eBay, Boeing and Apple.

However, those forced offline by the current problem appear to be smaller businesses, such as SocialSafe, a Surrey-based firm that allows users to keep track of their social media activity.

“It’s hugely disruptive. There’s obviously an adverse impact when your whole website goes down – that’s where people expect to download and access our service,” SocialSafe’s founder Julian Ranger told the BBC.

“We switched to Azure because the previous provider did occasionally have outages and obviously you want your site and the supporting software, which is hosted on servers behind it, to always be operating.

“The point about Azure was that they guarantee that your site will always be up because there are multiple places, effectively, where your software can run. If there’s one problem, it should happily switch to run elsewhere.

“And that’s just not happening today – we’re completely out.”

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