CloudStore taken offline by Microsoft Azure outage

CloudStore taken offline by Microsoft Azure outage

Hosting problems see G-Cloud's online marketplace taken down for several hours

CloudStore, the public sector's online marketplace for cloud services, has been taken offline due to an outage with its hosting platform, Microsoft's Azure.

CloudStore was officially launched earlier this month as a front end through which public sector bodies could buy from a catalogue of 1,700 cloud services provided by 255 vendors.

The government's @G_Cloud_UK Twitter account announced the outage at 12.11 on Wednesday saying: "Power outage on microsoft azure means #cloudstore is temporarily unavailable. Patch being applied so will update when normal service resumed."

That outage had yet to be fixed at the time of publication, over three hours later.

In a subsequent tweet , G_Cloud_UK wrote: "Microsoft are moving us to a different azure install and are confident we'll be up and running again by 4pm."

According to Microsoft's Azure service dashboard, the outage began early this morning and affected Azure's service management. It has since also hit its user authentication and authorisation component, Access Control 2.0.

"We are experiencing an issue with Access Control 2.0 in the north Europe sub-regions. Users are not able to access their ACS namespaces at this time. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers," the dashboard says.

€Â¢ Update: A blog posted by Microsoft's corporate VP of server and cloud Bill Laing said the company is still investigating the cause ofthe outage but may have resulted from the 29 February date: "While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year."