Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Azure Services Collapse Due to Data Center Power Overload and Cooling Failure

Cooling equipment at a Microsoft data center went down due to a utility data center power spike, which resulted in an outage. Customers hosted in the South East Asia cloud area experienced a variety of problems as a result of the outage. According to Microsoft's status page, when cooling capability was compromised, data center temperatures rose, and they proactively turned off a number of storage and compute units to prevent hardware degradation and lower cooling system strain. 

The same data center, which included one of the three Availability Zones (AZs) for the area, housed all affected storage and computing scale units. The damage would have extended to several downstream services. Among the websites affected by the outage were those of Esplanade and Nanyang Technological University (NTU). People were unable to use its service, according to the Central Provident Fund Board, a broad savings and retirement plan for Singaporeans, because of the "regional outage." A cooling loss at a Microsoft data center in the UK in 2020 led to a similar outage and the failure of the nation's Covid-19 monitoring software.