Microsoft release RCA for UK South Outage

Microsoft Azure UK South region suffered a significant outage on the 14th September 2020, which caused a wide range of service failures for customers in this region. The full root cause analysis has now been provided by Microsoft, and can be found here

This outage highlights the requirement for careful architectural planning when moving to any cloud provider. As best practice, and to ensure services continue to run in the event of a similar failure, services should be distributed across multiple locations And accessed using load balancing tools. If high availability is not required or not achievable then a DR plan should be in place, to ensure services can be failed over to another location, as there is no guarantee how long such outages may last.

All environments, including on-premise and private cloud solutions are subject to failures and require business continuity planning. However there is a common misconception that public cloud platforms inherently eliminate these risks. Issues such as this serve to demonstrate that this is not the case.

For more information about the outage; please get in touch.