Azure stumbles in Western Europe, Microsoft blames ‘thermal event’
Summary
Microsoft reported a “thermal event” in its West Europe Azure region (the Netherlands) that caused cooling-system issues and knocked a subset of storage scale units offline in a single availability zone. The incident, detected after automated monitoring flagged a spike in hardware temperatures, led to degraded performance and possible service disruptions across multiple services including Virtual Machines, Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Servers, MySQL Flexible Servers, Azure Kubernetes Service, Storage, Service Bus, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, and Azure Databricks (affecting Unity Catalog and Databricks SQL).
One storage scale unit had recovered at the time of the report and Microsoft said recovery efforts were underway for others, with signs of recovery expected in around 90 minutes for affected units. The company warned that resources in other availability zones that depend on the impacted storage units may also be affected.
Key Points
- Microsoft attributes the outage to a thermal event that impacted datacentre cooling and caused storage scale units to go offline in one availability zone.
- Multiple Azure services in West Europe experienced degraded performance or disruptions: VMs, managed databases, AKS, Storage, Service Bus, VM Scale Sets, and Databricks workloads.
- Automated monitoring detected a hardware temperature spike and related incidents across storage units, prompting mitigation and recovery actions.
- One storage scale unit had recovered; Microsoft expected further recovery signs on other units in approximately 90 minutes at the time of the update.
- Services in other availability zones that depend on the affected storage units may also be impacted — illustrating that AZ distribution is not an absolute guarantee of resilience.
- The event underlines systemic risks in hyperscale cloud operations where infrastructure dependencies can cause cross-AZ effects.
Why should I read this?
Short version: if you run stuff in Azure West Europe — check it now. This isn’t a cute, isolated blip; it shows an availability-zone hiccup can ripple across services that you thought were isolated. If you manage cloud-hosted apps, this little read’ll save you panicking later.
Author’s take
Punchy and plain: cloud resilience patterns matter. Microsoft’s explanation is plausible — heat + cooling = pain — but the real kicker is the cross-AZ dependency. Organisations that trust AZ separation as a silver bullet need to reassess backup, replication and multi-region strategies pronto.
Context and relevance
Hyperscaler outages have been recurring reminders that architectural assumptions about isolation and redundancy can fail in practice. This incident feeds into ongoing industry conversations about multi-region deployments, disaster recovery planning, and the limits of availability-zone-based resilience. For European customers and those with latency- or data-residency-driven deployments in the Netherlands region, the event is particularly relevant.