Azure Failure Was a Leap Year Glitch 247
Posted
by
timothy
from the azure-wish-they'd-looked-at-a-calendar dept.
from the azure-wish-they'd-looked-at-a-calendar dept.
judgecorp writes "Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud service was down much of yesterday, and the cause was a leap year bug as the service failed to handle the 29th day of February. Faults propagated making this a severe outage for many customers, including the UK Government's recently launched G-cloud service."
Who could have foreseen a leap year coming? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, if my American high school education taught me nothing else, it was that those things only come along like every 100 years or something.
Re:TCO TIC (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously you didn't inform yourself with the very helpful and informative "Get The Facts" materials Microsoft provided us with a few years ago. If you had you would know how much higher the TCO of Linux on the server is even after a massive outage.
Same Story / Different Day (Score:5, Funny)
28 days (Score:5, Funny)
In a new press conference.. (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft has told the press that they don't expect the Azure cloud service to fail again for years. In an unrelated schedule change, a down-for-maintenance slot was scheduled 4 years in advance.
office in the cloud (Score:5, Funny)
It's sold as Office 365 not Office 366
Re:Who could have foreseen a leap year coming? (Score:5, Funny)
Save us, Captain Obvious! *swoons* :P
Re:Who could have foreseen a leap year coming? (Score:5, Funny)
In all fairness, Microsoft never figured anyone would still be using this service by the time a leap year rolled around.
Only Happens Every 4 Years (Score:5, Funny)
It's not Micorsoft's fault; they're a publicly traded company so they can't think about multi-year events. They're prohibited from considering anything that is beyond the next fiscal quarter.
Re:A leap year issue? Are you SERIOUS? (Score:3, Funny)
Shouldn't 'pathetic' be in uppercase?
Re:28 days (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Same Story / Different Day (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Dumb people never learn (Score:5, Funny)
Attention Microsoft: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What is it with Microsoft and Leap Year? (Score:3, Funny)
Now, I'm not necessarily a Microsoft apologist, but I have to point out that it wasn't so long ago that other things near and dear to us geeks were experiencing similar problems.
I was trying to run some ant scripts yesterday that interact with an FTP server to delete some files. Those damned files wouldn't get deleted. They weren't even returned from a listing command. As it turns out, I was using a particularly old version of Apache Commons-Net library (this jar file was from 2005) which had a leap-year bug. It simply would not show me files with modification dates of 2/29. I was looking at the FTP server configuration, logging in with other clients, moving and renaming files, and all about ready to break out Wireshark... and then it occurred to me that it was leap day. Hoo-fucking-ray. "touch"ed the file, and sure enough, it was suddenly available. Those are a few hours of my life I'll never get back.
Your post is not anti-Microsoft, so you must be a shill.
Re:Dumb people never learn (Score:4, Funny)
Hey! My MS4000 keyboard and MS mouse are working jut fine.
I see what you did there.
Re:Same Story / Different Day (Score:5, Funny)
Well, we knew it was a Microsoft product so we knew they bought it from someone.
Re:Attention Microsoft: (Score:4, Funny)
The thought of an MS pacemaker EULA is pretty scary....
Re:What a shame (Score:5, Funny)
We still see this kind of XXXX coming up every leap year.
We're all adults (or close enough to it, anyway) here. I think we're all capable of seeing the word "shit" without our faces melting like that nazi who peeped in the ark.
My apologies to everyone who is now having their face melt off after reading that previous sentence.
Re:Who could have foreseen a leap year coming? (Score:5, Funny)
In all fairness, Microsoft never figured anyone would still be using this service by the time a leap year rolled around.
I work on the Azure team and I can confirm this.
Re:Same Story / Different Day (Score:4, Funny)
According to Microsoft all time started on Jan 1, 0001.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.ticks.aspx [microsoft.com]
No fricking wonder the "system idle process" uses 19% of a cpu. The OS is counting to a billion every second.
Ooops. But they still lots of things in 32bit land, too.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re:Who could have foreseen a leap year coming? (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft has solved the problem and applied a patch to their systems.
The new patch is anticipated to keep the service up and stable for least 4 years.
-