Microsoft Azure had a rough year with big outages and long downtimes

In the tech world stats are easy to come by and can be hard to defend. A recent report has been released which ranks the different cloud providers by their downtime, and Microsoft does not look good. Amazon and Google both had very little downtime in 2014 for both their compute and storage services. Azure on the other hand suffered several outages which yielded considerable total downtime.

Most cloud providers have a Service Level Agreement (SLA) which states an up time guarantee and if that is not met, then the company has to pay their customers for the lost time. Google and Amazon’s cloud storage service were only down for 14.23 minutes and 2.69 hours respectively over all of 2014, and Google’s compute engine was only down for a total of 3.4hrs in the year. Microsoft Azure had compute downtimes totaling 42.94 hours and storage downtimes totaling 10.94 hours.

While these stats are not good, it doesn’t mean that Azure is doomed. 2014 was a big year of growth for Microsoft and hopefully 2015 will be a year where Microsoft invests in stability and has a better record than 2014. These stats are also signs that Amazon and Google may have more stable and mature clouds for now, but Microsoft can still compete on price and features.