Microsoft’s cloud crashed on Friday. Big time.
Just before 2 p.m. Pacific time, Microsoft reported worldwide problems with its Windows Azure cloud computing platform. The problem has to do with the security certificate used by Azure’s storage service, which in turn affected a number of other Azure services.
That meant that web developers who tried to connect to Azure securely over the internet in order to run their programs weren’t getting through. Instead, they were greeted with error messages.
“Storage is currently experiencing a Worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic),” Microsoft said Friday afternoon on its Azure service dashboard, referring to the standard protocols used to provide secure access to web services. “We have identified the root cause and are validating the recovery options before implementing them.”
The company didn’t identify the root cause of the problem or respond immediately to an inquiry from Wired. According to this post in Microsoft’s Azure community forums, the SSL, or secure sockets layer, certificate used by Microsoft had been set to expire on Friday.
“I feel sorry for the person at Microsoft who will have to deal with this,” wrote one commenter. “Looks like someone must be regenerating a new certificate and figuring out how to deploy it platform-wide right about now. Pretty amazing that the entire Windows Azure storage platform is offline globally.”
