[German]On February 20, 2025, there was a major disruption to the Microsoft Azure Cloud in Norway. The affected services were unavailable for hours. Norwegian authorities and the government were among those severely affected, as they had moved their services to the Microsoft cloud.
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Azure outage in Norway East
On February 20, 2025, there was a disruption to the Microsoft Azure cloud in the Norway-East region, as can be seen in the following post.
At around 10:23 UTC on February 20, it was reported that Azure servers in Norway East may be experiencing connection problems. At 10:53 UTC, it was announced that the disruption was being investigated – and at 14:17 UTC it was announced that the Azure services were available again.
Downdetector shows that the disruption began in the morning and lasted until the afternoon of February 20, 2025 – although the level of disruption was not really high.
Consequences for companies and authorities
At around 18:00 on the same day, there was already an entry in the Windows forum dealing with the outage and the resulting findings.
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An Azure outage occurred on the morning of February 20, 2025, with the problems first occurring at around 9:00 a.m. local time and lasting for more than three hours. Microsoft's Azure Service Health Dashboard showed a "green" (fully functional) status for Azure Norway despite ongoing issues.
The Register picked up on the incident in this article, as the Azure outage caused severe disruption to digital infrastructure for Norwegian businesses and government agencies. Several government websites that provide online services to citizens were paralyzed by the Azure outage. The Norwegian government's website, Regjeringen.no, was down for several hours.
For the Norway East region, Cosmos DB was down and unavailable. Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed database service offered by Microsoft that is designed to provide modern applications with high availability, scalability and access to data with low latency, according to Wikipedia.
Due to the Azure outage, web applications were unavailable for some users, storage accounts (OneDrive) did not work and Azure Virtual Desktop was also down. However, not all Azure customers in Norway were affected.
But the outages of government services and websites, combined with the discrepancy that the Azure status signaled everything was in the green, caused the ire of affected users. The Windows forum has a nice write-up of the outage, stating that cloud computing offers unprecedented convenience and scalability. However, the network outage in Norway shows that reliance on centralized cloud platforms – even from industry leaders such as Microsoft – has significant vulnerabilities.
The curse of the cloud
The incident is a wake-up call for both cloud providers and customers regarding the need for robust failover mechanisms and redundancy. Even if a service such as Azure achieves high overall availability times, local failures can have serious consequences.
The misleading indicators are also criticized, which can lead to delayed responses and longer downtimes, especially for mission-critical operations in the public sector. In a government environment where trust and accessibility are paramount, such outages can undermine confidence.
If citizens do not have access to public documents or information about their leadership, their trust in digitalization by the state will be severely weakened. The article in the Windows forum goes into more general terms about the consequences of the failure of cloud functions and shows what risks are lurking there – because there have been similar cases in the past. It looks like some people are slowly realizing that "clouds are just other people's computers" that don't always have to work.
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