Microsoft digs down on Azure outage, explores data loss and failover question

Microsoft has put together a post-mortem on what it described as an 'unprecedented' Azure outage - exploring an interesting question of data loss and failover capability. The outage, which affected customers on the VSTS - or Azure DevOps - service in the South Central US region, required more than 21 hours to recover all facilities, as well as an additional incident regarding a database which went offline taking another two hours to resolve. As the status page - which originally went down with the rest of the service - noted at the time, the cause was blamed on high storms in the Texas area. With the power swells that resulted, the data centres were able to maintain temperature through a thermal buffer - but when that was depleted, automated shutdown took place after temperatures exceeded safe levels.