Microsoft’s Azure Storage and Websites cloud services go down, then come back

Infrastructure for multiple Azure public-cloud services from Microsoft malfunctioned for more than a half-hour in multiple parts of the world tonight, but they’re now working properly, according to the Azure status page.

The Azure Storage issues impacted several Azure regions, including Central U.S., East U.S., West U.S., and North Europe.

“An alert for Websites and Storage in multiple regions is being investigated. It has not been determined if this is customer impacting. More information will be provided as it is known,” Microsoft wrote in an update posted at around 6:10 p.m. Pacific.

But by 6:34 p.m., service had been restored.

The issues affected games on Xbox Live, among other Microsoft products.

In the past, outages have also hit competing public cloud services from Amazon and Google. Now, as Microsoft challenges those companies in the fiercely competitive cloud market, Microsoft is under pressure to keep its services available all the time and ensure that customers stay informed. Outages at this time, then, matter quite a bit.