Azure networking snafu enters day 2, some services still limping

Microsoft on Friday warned Azure cloud service users may continue to experience "intermittent errors," blaming the problem on a US East regional networking service configuration change.

The outage, which began around 2200 UTC on January 8, was "limited to a single zone in the East US 2 region," according to Redmond. "A network configuration issue in one of the zones resulted in three of the Storage partitions going unhealthy," reads an Azure status alert. 

As a result, customers experienced "intermittent Virtual Machine connectivity issues, failures in allocating resources or communicating with resources in the region."

Affected services include Azure Databricks, Azure Container Apps, Azure Function Apps, Azure App Service, SQL Managed Instances, Azure Data Factory, Azure Container Instances, PowerBI, VMSS, PostgreSQL flexible servers, and others, plus customers using resources with Private Endpoint Network Security Groups to communicate with other services.

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In an attempt to remediate the problem, Microsoft said it rerouted traffic away from the affected zone, "which brought some relief to the non-zonal services." However, as of Friday morning, "services that sent zonal requests to the impacted zone remained unhealthy."

As of 1639 UTC on January 10, all three of the impacted partitions had been brought back online, and Microsoft had patched the Private Link issues, noting that all Private Link dependent services were up and running.

While Redmond noted "significant signs of recovery," it added that "individual services are still recovering, and some customers may continue to see intermittent errors and degraded performance" while the recovery continues. It did not provide an expected time or date for full recovery.

The tech giant promised to provide more details on its progress in hourly updates, and urged customers to execute disaster recovery for their impacted cloud services. ®