On Wednesday (8 Feb), a power outage in Microsoft Azure cloud services disrupted connectivity for multiple platforms.
The affected sites included those belonging to the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Board, EZ-Link, Esplanade and the Nanyang Technological University (NTU).
All services appear to be functional as of today (9 Feb).
According to The Straits Times (ST), web services under the CPF Board, EZ-Link, Esplanade, and NTU experienced technological issues on Wednesday (8 Feb).
At the time of writing, all services seemed to have returned to full functionality.
The platforms attributed the disruptions to the power outage in Microsoft Azure cloud services.
At 9.35am on Wednesday (8 Feb), EZ-Link announced via Facebook that they were experiencing connectivity problems.
Source: EZ-Link on Facebook
“We are working closely with the service provider on service restoration,” they said.
SimplyGo EZ-Link, SimplyGo Concession, and EZ-Link Wallet services were among those affected.
Users could not access payment features, upgrade services or track their transaction history.
NTU’s website also reportedly experienced several disruptions. The university apologised for the inaccessibility. “Our team is working diligently to resolve the issue and restore access as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused and appreciate your patience,” it said.
Visitors to Esplanade and CPF Board websites were allegedly unable to use them as well.
Meanwhile, CPF Board’s site said, “Microsoft is experiencing a regional outage that is affecting multiple websites. If you have difficulty accessing CPF digital services on our website, please use the CPF Mobile app instead.”
They updated users about the situation at around 8.30am on 9 Feb, stating that their engineers had deployed a workaround and almost all website visitors could access their digital services since 8 Feb, 12pm.
“We will update again once Microsoft has fully completed their restoration,” they said.
All platforms are now available at the time of writing.
Issues with Microsoft Azure first emerged at around 7am on 8 Feb in Singapore, ST reports.
60% of reports said they had difficulties connecting with their server, with 30% reporting problems with hosting. 10% of users also noted they had issues logging in.
Microsoft Azure then announced that a utility power surge occurred in Southeast Asia at 3.19am on 8 Feb. It tripped a subset of cooling units in a data centre, causing them to go offline.
The firm proactively powered down a small subset of selected compute and storage scale units to minimise damage to hardware.
“Multiple downstream services have been identified as impacted,” Microsoft Azure said. The power outage disrupted almost all of their services in the region on 8 Feb, according to ST.
Their latest update on the situation noted that the restoration of core storage and compute services has been completed successfully, with other key services fully recovered.
“We are closely monitoring the datacenter metrics for storage and compute resources which continue to show healthy thresholds,” Microsoft Azure said. “We will continue to provide updates as we have further progress towards service restoration.”
This latest incident comes on the heels of Microsoft’s Outlook email service experiencing an outage, which returned to full availability on 7 Feb.
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Featured images adapted from Private Banker International.
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