Windows Azure outage hits CloudStore

Ongoing availability problems with cloud platform's service management and compute platforms forces G-Cloud and others offline

Microsoft's cloud-based Windows Azure has been experiencing a worldwide service management outage for more than 12 hours.

The platform has had problems since 1.45am last night, according to a Microsoft Service Dashboard, which, at the time of writing, had also stopped functioning. The issue has affected customers' ability to use service management tools to track and manage deployments.

Fixes began being deployed this morning, and in its last update – from 1.30pm – Microsoft claims that "the issue is mitigated and service management is restored for the majority of customers".

The update adds: "We still need to work through some issues before we can completely restore service management. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation."

Microsoft is also experiencing problems with the availability of Azure Compute offerings and, as of 1.30pm, is "still troubleshooting this issue and verifying the most probable cause".

The recently launched G-Cloud CloudStore is built on an Azure platform. G-Cloud representatives announced on Twitter two hours ago that a "power outage on Microsoft Azure means CloudStore is temporarily unavailable. Patch [is] being applied so will update when normal service resumed."