The UK government’s recently launched cloud services procurement portal was taken offline for at least two hours today after Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform, on which it is hosted, suffered a power outage.
"Power outage on Microsoft Azure means #cloudstore is temporarily unavailable," the official G-Cloud twitter feed confirmed at 12:22PM. "Patch being applied so will update when normal service resumed."
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UPDATE The G-Cloud Twitter account confirmed that CloudStore was back online at 17:40.
Windows Azure has been suffering performance difficulties since the early hours of this morning. The performance monitoring portal reports that there was an issue with "Windows Azure service management" at 1:45 GMT this morning. At 3:00, it reported that "a limited number of currently running hosted services may experience a capacity impact" as a result of the issue.
At 5:00, it said the outage had been "traced back to a cert issue" and that work had begun on a fix for the issue. At 13:30, it said "the issue is mitigated and service management is restored for the majority of customers".
The CloudStore was designed and built in just six weeks by Solidsoft, a specialist Microsoft consultancy based in Basingstoke.
