Outage Downs Windows Store Anew: Is Microsoft Doing Performance Upgrade?

According to a report of Windows Central, some Windows 8 and 8.1 users have experienced difficulties accessing and connecting to the Windows Store.

The report noted that the Windows Store is currently experiencing some outage but it is not yet clear as to why it happened.

The website Is it down right now? however claims that the Microsoft Store is currently "up and reachable."

It noted that the site has a response time of 15.15 ms and has been last down more than three hours ago as of press time.

As of November 20, 19:21 PT, the site has a ping time of 17.29 ms.

"If microsoftstore.com is down for us too there is nothing you can do except waiting. Probably the server is overloaded, down or unreachable because of a network problem, outage or a website maintenance is in progress," it said.

Last Tuesday, Microsoft's Azure cloud-computing service was down.

In a statement posted on its website Wednesday, Microsoft Azure Team's corporate vice president Jason Zander apologized for the service interruption in the United States, Europe, and some parts of Asia.

Zander said that they have discovered an issue after efforts to update the performance of Azure Storage have been made.

This problem caused reduced capacity in services utilizing Azure Storage, Virtual Machines, Visual Studio Online, Websites, Search and other Microsoft services, he said.

He added that the performance update had been tested for some weeks before the actual application. This process wherein they try to identify issues hounding the update is called "flighting."

"The flighting test demonstrated a notable performance improvement and we proceeded to deploy the update across the storage service," he said.

However, the team was able to find an issue during the actual rollout. The problem has caused "storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop." They claimed that they never detected it during the flighting.

"The net result was an inability for the front ends to take on further traffic, which in turn caused other services built on top to experience issues," Zander said.

After this, the team had fixed it, undoing the performance update. It noted that even if the issue has already been fixed, some customers are still having difficulties accessing the service. It however said that their support and engineering teams are always ready to help their customers.

"When we have an incident like this, our main focus is rapid time to recovery for our customers, but we also work to closely examine what went wrong and ensure it never happens again.  We will continually work to improve our customers' experiences on our platform.  We will update this blog with a RCA (root cause analysis) to ensure customers understand how we have addressed the issue and the improvements we will make going forward," Zander said in the statement.

The company revealed that the root cause of the issue is a "bug in the Blob Front-Ends exposed by the configuration change."

The Microsoft Azure team promised that they are now taking steps to make everything okay and that they will continue their investigation regarding the matter so as incidents such as this will no longer occur in the future.

Reuters noted that Microsoft also suffered a major Azure outage last August.