A significant portion of Azure is down today, which is where many cloud applications that are used on a daily basis are hosted. This is something to keep in mind, when thinking about moving to the cloud vs. keeping applications on premise. When something like this happens, businesses are at the mercy of the provider to get it fixed. One question to ask your self is, how critical each application is to your business if it were to go down? Then making the decision on whether or not using a cloud application would make sense vs keeping it on premise.

Status update from Microsoft (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/status/)

Starting at 09:29 UTC on 04 Sep 2018, customers in South Central US may experience difficulties connecting to resources hosted in this region. Engineers have isolated an issue with cooling in one part of the data center, which caused a localized spike in temperature, as the preliminary root-cause, which has now been mitigated. Automated datacenter procedures to ensure data and hardware integrity went into effect when temperatures hit a specified threshold and critical hardware entered a structured power down process. Engineers have successfully restored power to some of the affected devices and are starting to see signs of recovery, though mitigation efforts are still ongoing.

Customers in North America may also be experiencing intermittent authentication issues due to downstream Azure Active Directory impact, and engineers are separately working on mitigation options for this also. While some customers may start seeing signs of recovery, mitigation efforts for AAD are still ongoing.

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