Just when people were getting smug about cloud, Microsoft's Azure cloud service has suffered a widespread failure that started Tuesday and still persists for some areas.
According to reports, it may have been triggered by a cert issue. Sites such as Ars technica said
Data Center Knowledge and other publications cited a Microsoft statement that the meltdown was caused by a "cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012." This prompted speculation that a bug related to today's February 29 leap-year date interfered with Azure systems processing digital certificates.
However, a Microsoft statement noted that the problem actually started Tuesday afternoon:
On February 28th, 2012 at 5:45 PM PST Microsoft became aware of an issue impacting Windows Azure service management in a number of regions. Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers. Some customers in 3 sub regions - North Central US, South Central US and North Europe - remain affected. Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible We will update the Service Dashboard, at www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service-dashboard/, hourly until this incident is resolved.
As of 5 pm on Feb. 29, a number of services are still listed on the dashboard as Unavailable.