Microsoft Azure storage ends the week with a bang — and not in a good way

That’s life, as Frank Sinatra once sang. Microsoft Azure Storage was named the world’s best public cloud storage service on Tuesday, then crashes and burns on Friday.

Here are a few of the posts to the Windows Azure status dashboard:

22-Feb-13 · 9:45 PM UTC

Access Control v2, Service Bus, WindowsAzure.com and WebSites services are impacted by Storage service degradation worldwide. We are actively validating the recovery steps to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

22-Feb-13 · 8:44 PM UTC

We are experiencing an issue with Storage Worldwide and this is impacting all dependent services. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers.

azure storage outage Folks on Twitter and elsewhere attributed the snafu to the lack of a new SSL certificate. If such a certificate does expire, users cannot authenticate against their various services: No authentication, no access.

I’ve asked Microsoft for comment and will update this when they do. Whatever the cause of the snafu, it’s been an up-and-down week for Windows Azure. On Tuesday, Nasuni, a company that manages cloud storage for business customers, said Windows Azure storage outperformed all four other cloud services — including Amazon S3 — in rigorous performance testing. Despite Azure’s performance, Nasuni said it would stick to S3 as its primary supplier, citing its maturity. Looks like that may have been the right call.

Windows #Azure Blob Storage service is down due certificate issue. Check update at Windows Azure Service Dashboard:
windowsazure.com/en-us/support/…—
Avkash Chauhan (@avkashchauhan) February 22, 2013