On August 18, starting just before 2 p.m. ET/11 a.m. PT, users across the globe began reporting problems with Microsoft's Azure virtual machines, web sites and other cloud services.
"Starting at 18 Aug 2014 17:49 UTC we are experiencing an interruption to Cloud Services and Virtual Machines in multiple regions," noted Microsoft officials on the Azure staus page.
In the wake of last year's National Security Agency spying revelations and after the discovery of the high-profile "Heartbleed" vulnerability, security has become a top priority for cloud services providers.
Microsoft, for its part, is hardening its Azure Web Sites service with support for Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), announced Erez Benari, an Azure Web Sites program manager. Azure Web Sites is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offering that enables customers to quickly spin up and scale Websites and applications.
Microsoft has written to Oracle-on-Azure users, letting them know that as of March 12th they'll be paying for the Oracle bits of it.
Microsoft's multi-factor authentication service has gone into general availability, doubling prices and giving enterprises a service-level agreement.
Microsoft announced the general availability of the product in a blog post on Thursday. The MFA technology allows admins to add an additional layer of security to accounts using the company's cloud services.
After years of battling Linux as a competitive threat, Microsoft is now offering Linux-based operating systems on its Windows Azure cloud service.
The Linux services will go live on Azure at 4 a.m. EDT on Thursday. At that time, the Azure portal will offer a number of Linux distributions, including Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2, OpenSuse 12.01, CentOS 6.2 and Canonical Ubuntu 12.04. Azure users will be able to choose and deploy a Linux distribution from the Microsoft Windows Azure Image Gallery and be charged on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.
