Microsoft Azure customers in Northern Europe experienced a shutdown of some Microsoft services on September 29th, but so far we have no exact details on what exactly happened.
Apparently, the fire suppression system in one of the data centers is the cause of the outage of Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, Azure Backup, App Services\Web Apps, Azure Cache, Azure Monitor, Azure Functions, Time Series Insights, Stream Analytics, HDInsight, Data Factory, Azure Scheduler and Azure Site Recovery from 1:27 PM to 8:15 PM.
Microsoft says that during routine maintenance, personnel accidentally set the fire suppression system to release inert agent into the data center. As a result, the system blocked all Air Handler Units (AHU) to prevent oxygen from being distributed to the room in order to limit damage from a potential fire.
Although officials immediately corrected the temperature, certain areas were still hot enough to cause automatic shutdown of the systems to prevent data loss.
Unfortunately, automated operations led to the premature, uncontrolled shutdown of some servers, requiring Microsoft staff to manually restore the systems.
It took almost 7 hours to bring all systems back online.
"We sincerely apologize to the customers who were affected. We are continuously taking steps to improve the Microsoft Azure platform to ensure that such incidents do not occur in the future. Investigations to uncover the cause of the unexpected release are ongoing," Microsoft said.
As the company itself stated, the investigations are continuing and more details regarding the results will be published on October 13.
