back to article Microsoft brings Azure back online

Microsoft has managed to repair its Windows Azure cloud, after an expired SSL certificate downed storage and other services for people across the world. Ninety-nine percent of the affected services have been brought back online, Redmond said early in the hours of Saturday morning, Pacific Time. "We will continue monitoring …

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  1. danR2
    Paris Hilton

    The cloud floats majestically away...

    Beijing is going to eat the West for lunch.

    1. Don Jefe
      Joke

      Re: The cloud floats majestically away...

      Yes. But because they're using chopsticks it will take a while.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  2. ElNumbre
    FAIL

    20 goto 10

    To err once is human.

    To err twice takes a super-mega-corp.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Androgynous Crackwhore
      Thumb Up

      Re: 20 goto 10

      I thought Windows Azure is intended to be a sort of proof of concept technology advertisement. A carefully constructed and managed demonstration run by the corporation which creates and sells the underlying software - for the purpose of illustrating to the world what can be expected of it.

      It would appear to be fulfilling its role rather well.

      Too complicated for even its own super-mega-corp creator to operate? Splendid, I'll have some of that. Where do I sign?

    3. JeffyPooh
      Pint

      Re: 20 goto 10

      Their Certificate Expiry Tracking program hasn't yet been ported to Windows 8.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 20 goto 10

      REM Microsoft business model

      REM (c) 1975 by Microsoft Software Co.

      10 INPUT OPPORTUNITY$

      20 INPUT CLIENT$

      30 SET OUTPUT=CLIENT$

      40 PRINT "Microsoft can do that"

      50 PRINT "We've had a project like that for years"

      53 PRINT "We can deliver something better in half the time for half the cost"

      60 INPUT BUDGET$

      70 INPUT SCHEDULE$

      80 SIGN CONTRACT$

      90 GET BUDGET$

      100 PAUSE

      101 NEW PROJECT$

      102 PAUSE

      107 LET SCHEDULE$ = SCHEDULE$ + SCHEDULE$

      110 PRINT "Microsoft Software Inc is leveraging new technologies for expediteization of revolutionary solutionization"

      140 LET BUDGET$ = BUDGET$ + BUDGET$

      150 PAUSE

      160 PRINT "Microsoft "; OPPORTUNITY$ ; " is the next generation solution to leverage enterprize monitization"

      170 LET SCREENSHOTS$ = RANDOM

      180 PRINT SCREENSHOTS$

      200 LET SCHEDULE$ = SCHEDULE$ + SCHEDULE$

      210 PAUSE

      220 LET BUDGET$ = BUDGET$ + BUDGET$

      230 GET BUDGET$

      240 GET SMALL_COMPANY_EXPERIMENTING_IN_FIELD$

      250 PAUSE

      260 LET PROJECT$ = SMALL_COMPANY_EXPERIMENTING_IN_FIELD$

      270 PAUSE

      280 RANDOMIZE PROJECT$

      290 RANDOMIZE PROJECT$

      300 PRINT "Microsoft Software Inc, the worlds leading enterprize solution provider announces "; OPPORTUNITY$ ; " Pro XP 3000"

      310 DUMP PROJECT$

      320 GOTO 10

      RUN

  3. Bob Vistakin
    Devil

    Microsofts "customers" get Ballmered again

    Having stuffed them on phones, tablets and their comedy new desktop OS, destroying their faith in their cloud offering is an essential step in the slow car crash suicide that is 2013: Microsofts year of hell.

    1. AchimR
      Pint

      Re: Microsofts "customers" get Ballmered again

      "comedy new desktop" - love it!

      beer for ya

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Microsofts "customers" get Ballmered again

      Ballmer can get billions for slow-crashing the company into the ground, the operations guys are just following his lead. Corrupt CEO maybe? Ballmer and Beeblebrox.

  4. TJ1
    WTF?

    Monitoring for 24 hours...

    "We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage service and SSL traffic for the next 24 hours," the company wrote.

    And then?

    That statement makes it sound like they don't monitor the systems routinely unless something fails; explains alot!

  5. Richard Lloyd
    FAIL

    Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

    OK, so this happened last year, presumably on the annual renewal date. It begs how incompetent Microsoft is:

    1. Most secure cert registrars send out e-mail reminders (mine does with 90, 30 and 7 days to go) - did whoever they registered with not send such e-mails or did Microsoft just ignore them?

    2. A simple cron job to check the cert and e-mail (to more than one person!) every day at least 7 days before expiry would have saved their bacon.

    3. When they messed up last year, why didn't they renew the cert for more than one year? Surely Microsoft can afford a multi-year cert?!

    Multiple levels of incompetence there - that's Microsoft for you.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

      Suppose the real reason is something else but the cert.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        FAIL

        Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

        The people directly involved probably did know, but then had to find out who to bribe/blackmail into procuring a new certificate before the old one went belly up.

        Some of these big companies have an unbelievable amount of red tape and disparate divisions which are so out of touch with each-other they may as well be separate companies.

      2. Frumious Bandersnatch

        Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

        re: Suppose the real reason is something else but the cert.

        I suppose they should probably stop calling them "certs" then, if they aren't.

      3. P. Lee
        Coat

        Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

        Perhaps they weren't expecting the service to last that long...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

      Real enterprises don't use local schedulers, rather centralised scheduling. Anyone who thinks cron or windows scheduler is an acceptable solution in an enterprise, still has a lot to lean about IT.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

        "Real enterprises don't use local schedulers, rather centralised scheduling. Anyone who thinks cron or windows scheduler is an acceptable solution in an enterprise, still has a lot to lean about IT."

        Agreed. In this case even a good old calender reminder would have avoided this, though.

        It really doesn't matter how they schedule things, as long as they do it, which apparently wasn't the case here.

        "The global outage lasted for around 12 hours and occurred because Microsoft failed to renew a security certificate."

      2. Hans 1
        Boffin

        Re: Cron job needed and, er, why didn't they renew the cert for longer?

        So true!

        They could have used RunMyJobs (runmyjobs.com) which is a cloud-based scheduler that leaves your data in your data centers and does not rely on Microsoft to get their cert renewed ... it runs on Amazon, iirc.

  6. Robot

    Act 1, Scene 1

    [face in hands]

    [throws a chair against the wall]

    [does a bear scream]

    [throws a chair against the wall]

    [wrings an imaginary neck]

    [throws a Surface Pro against the wall]

  7. Paul Crawford Silver badge
    Trollface

    So how to customers get refunded?

    I guess this single outage trashes their SLA promises of uptime over the coming year, so what happens now for the customers? Do they get a year's refund or free?

    Yes, I know its online somewhere but could not be arsed looking up the legalise...

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: So how to customers get refunded?

      No "acts of idiot" are specifically excluded from the SLA

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Marketing buzzwords

    All this talk of how Cloud will revolutionize business and yet nobody describes exactly what it is.

    It is merely an internet computing Cluster which can be adapted to suite power required.

    It will save you from buying your own Cluster hardware and managing it but requires paying for by the hour with the loss of data security. Your Cloud vendor has access to your valuable IP and customer data.

    An advancement from Shared Plesk website hosting, Virtual/Dedicated Servers. You can upload your own machine image or build for the Cloud.

    Some allow SQL others LINQ and Hadoop.

    Hadoop may be fast but this comes at a cost of omitting required DBMS features. A DB change could result in a lot of code rewrite. Is it Transaction safe and does it allow online backups? When you add all the features of a DBMS it quickly comes down in speed.

    As for LINQ, is it really much simpler to use than SQL. You could suffer an unnecessary performance penalty.

    The marketing folks pushing Cloud need to understand its not the magic bullet that the industry desperately needs.

  9. kitreno
    Go

    monkey magic

    that monkey sounds useful on his cloud

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2huJqFsFDE

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh FFS!

    How hard is it to write some code to check certificate expiry dates?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh FFS!

      How hard is it to make a browser/shell allocate itself no more cache than it can actually manage and thus prevent it from slowly killing the sheeples systems?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The big intro text on their website homepage says...

    "A rock-solid cloud platform for blue-sky thinking"

    I hope they're doing that to be ironic.

    1. Captain DaFt
      Coat

      Re: The big intro text on their website homepage says...

      ""A rock-solid cloud platform for blue-sky thinking"

      I hope they're doing that to be ironic."

      Well, Looks like a fair description to me. When the cloud drops like a rock, there's nothing left overhead but empty. blue skies

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cloud is like the recent beef/horse food chain debacle.

    Lots of managers looking around saying "Why would I want to pay to maintain a known chain of suppliers, a whole lot of equipment, and staff, when I can just buy it cheaper through a long chain of third party suppliers, and I won't have all that work managing all them things"... "think about how big my bonus will be when I deliver all them savings".

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Are you sure you aren't thinking of the 787 battery debacle

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Microsoft Secure Professional PowerCloud XP Enterprise 3000 ...

    ... has encountered an unexpected error and must now close.

    Try reinstalling the Cloud, and then reboot.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      The Microsoft Secure Professional PowerCloud XP Enterprise 9000 ...

      ...cannot do that. I'm sorry Dave.

      Please place your data into the airlock.

      Please Dave.

      It's very important Dave. You must place your data into the airlock.

      Place your data into the airlock Dave.

  14. Gray
    Facepalm

    Somebody surely got ballmered ...

    Nope ... no chair smash against the wall this time. Monkey-boy has no doubt called the Azure crew into his office, and he's smashed his chairs on their monkey-butts.

    Atta boy, Ballmer. I read the piece in Fortune Magazine awhile back about how M$ motivates its crew. He had to expect that this was comin' down the pipeline.

    2013 ... the year all the monkeys came to dance on Monkey-Boy's head.

  15. JassMan
    Trollface

    Roll on Feb 2014. Obviously they will be going for 16 hours next time.

  16. pixl97

    Failure at point of no redundancy.

    Redundant Hardware: Check.

    Redundant Network: Check.

    Redundant DNS: Check.

    Redundant Services: Check.

    Single point of failure at certificate services: Check, wait not FAIL, crap ARRAHHH.

    Design tip for next time, find a way for your services to use two different set of certificates from two different providers. Make sure the expiry dates differ. Have stuff warn, but not fail if there is a problem with one.

    I'd like my consulting fee now.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Digital Pearl Harbor?

    What a ballmer, one stooge at Microsoft can bring down a large part of the US digital infrastructure, was it a spy or was he shorting MSFT?

  18. AidanCheddar
    Paris Hilton

    Hmm...

    So, what we've learned? Windows sucks as a server.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hmm...

      No, we have learned that crypto is complicated and can bring down your systems with a simple oversight.

  19. Herby

    Just an example of...

    ...The "Microsoft Attitude". Of course they know better, that's why they work that way.

    It goes back to MS-DOS (probably before). A company unwilling to accept "outside opinions", getting stuck in its ways.

    For the observant, there seem to be many current examples, too numerous to show here, I'll let the reader fill in the b l a n k s.

  20. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    it's all relative

    Azure is down so often that I'm never sure when I look at the status page what "operating normally" means... does it mean it's broken like normal, or working nominally to spec?

  21. Doug Bostrom

    A day passes, and then another year

    "We will continue monitoring the health of the Storage service and SSL traffic for the next 24 hours..."

    ...and then we will ignore the situation for 364 days, until our cert once again expires.

    Only for 24 hours? Surely not, but surely they'd also be a little more careful in their phrasing, one would think.

  22. dajames
    Devil

    What's the lesson here?

    It's really rather clever. By omitting to renew a single certificate -- and administrative "error" that could be made on any service, regardless of the operating system that supports it -- Microsoft downed their own cloud service for a short while, demonstrating to world+canine that cloud services can't be guaranteed to be 100% available, and that if you rely on the cloud for your work (or play) you're stuffed when the service goes away.

    I'm sure the lesson Microsoft want you to take away from this is that you should do all your work on an actual PC running an installed OS and software. You might choose to use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office -- most people do -- go out and buy yours today.

    Result!

  23. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Outlook running on Azure, or what?

    Down for 2 hours now. Ofcourse this can be a disgruntled Azure customer getting their own back

    http://downrightnow.com/hotmail

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