Yes, it was a technical problem and we all have sympathy for these because we experience them, and are sometimes responsible for them. Azure has, in general, performed very well and this incident is uncharacteristic. For me, the problem was that Microsoft's marketing department had previously over-egged the pudding by talking up the resilience of Azure 'Always up, Always on'. If they'd been more circumspect, and said that, on balance, there would be outages in any cloud service but these would probably be fewer than you'd expect from your own in-house IT Infrastructure (the Azure SLA quotes 99.95% uptime) , then it wouldn't have caused so much of a story. With marketing material, any IT manager needs to know by how much to dilute the claims, and they're likely to add plenty more water after this incident. After all, the occurrence of a leap year is rather more predictable than an earthquake.