Windows Azure: Storage at South Central US goes down for 77 hours

Last December 28, at 3:16 PM UTC Microsoft repport a issue that partially impacting the availability of Storage service in the South Central US sub-region. Two hour later, Microsoft indicate that the availability is unaffected for all other services and sub-regions but currently unable to display the status of the individual services and sub-regions due to the above mentioned issue.

At 6:16 PM UTC Microsoft find has identified the root cause and implementing the repair steps to recover the impacted Storage stamp but 3 hour later, Microsoft indicate the repair steps are taking longer because it involves recovery of some faulty nodes on the impacted cluster.

On December 29, 1:16 AM UTC Microsoft precise that Services dependent on the storage accounts on the affected cluster, hosted service deployments and new VM creation jobs worldwide are impacted by this incident.

On December 30, 9:00 PM UTC, repair steps are still underway and Microsoft indicate:

Windows Azure provides asynchronous geo replication of Blob & Table data between data centers, but does not currently support geo-replication for Queue data or failover per Storage account. If a failover were to occur, it would impact all accounts on the affected Storage cluster, resulting in loss of Queue data and some recent Blob & Table data.

On December 31, 7:00 AM UTC, South Central US sub-region Storage was restored and Microsoft indicate that almost all customers should have access to their data. It is at 10:16 AM UTC that the issue was closed.

(source)