Let’s think of it as a graduation of sorts for cloud services: you haven’t made it until you’ve experienced at least one major crash. Microsoft’s time was this weekend, apparently. For 22 hours from 10:30pm Pacific on Friday to about 8:30pm PDT Saturday, Windows Azure was unavailable. It is not immediately clear exactly what caused it to go down.
We’ll likely not know until after Mix 09, happening this week in Las Vegas. That’s because Azure has a large presence at the event, and Redmond probably doesn’t want to deal with outage questions while they’re trying to talk it up. But you gotta think journos and bloggers are going to be peppering representatives with questions on what exactly happened…