The company will also improve services to ensure the situation doesn't appear again

Mar 13, 2012 15:05 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is offering 33 percent credit to all of its customers who have been affected by an outage that hit the Windows Azure platform on February 29th.

On that day, the Windows Azure management system went down due to a software bug that Microsoft identifies as the “leap day” bug.

Basically, due to the manner in which the system was created, certificates issued for February 29th featured a valid-to date of February 29th, 2013, which, being an invalid date, caused the system to fail.

The system was down for most of that day for Microsoft’s Windows Azure customers, many of which were greatly impacted by the outage. To compensate for that, Microsoft announced that it would be offering the aforementioned 33 percent credit to customers.

In a recent blog post on MSDN, Bill Laing from the Windows Azure Team explains both the issue that appeared that day, as well as what Microsoft did to resolve it and to make sure the problem won’t appear again.

“Microsoft recognizes that this outage had a significant impact on many of our customers. We stand behind the quality of our service and our Service Level Agreement (SLA), and we remain committed to our customers,” he notes.

“Due to the extraordinary nature of this event, we have decided to provide a 33% credit to all customers of Windows Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus and Caching for the entire affected billing month(s) for these services, regardless of whether their service was impacted.

“These credits will be applied proactively and will be reflected on a billing period subsequent to the affected billing period. Customers who have additional questions can contact support for more information.”

To address this issue, Microsoft had to modify some of its internal tooling and plans on making further enhancements to them to avoid similar situation and to ensure fast recovery.

Moreover, the company will work on enhancing the recovery for Windows Azure infrastructure services, such as ACS and Windows Azure Service Bus, so that they would be restored first, to minimalize impact on customers.