Microsoft’s cloud platform suffered a major outage late last month, with what is said to be an expired SSL certificate. For better or for worse (better, most probably) Redmond nailed the problem in approximately 12 hours.
And now the company has planned to offer compensation to its clients.
The company detailed the interruption in a blog post on MSDN and said that all customers will receive credits according to their respective SLAs (service-level-agreement):
“Given the scope of the outage, we will proactively provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with our SLA. The credit will be reflected on a subsequent invoice. Our teams are also working hard on a full root cause analysis (RCA), including steps to help prevent any future reoccurrence.”
The impact of the outage was considerable, as everyone from businesses to app developers were affected. A fair few took to the Windows Azure MSDN forum and voiced their concerns.
One has to wonder how Redmond could have let this happen, when it is betting so heavily on its cloud future. The company has spent billions building up the Windows Azure cloud platform, after all.
This is not the first outage that Microsoft has had to explain, and it is safe to assume will not be the last. Still, one can bet that this is something Microsoft is going to make sure does not happen in the future.
