In a surprising turn of events, both Oracle Cloud and Azure (Microsoft) cloud service suffered a major outage at their respective data centers in Sydney. The incident, which occurred on the night of 30th August (Sydney Time), left numerous users and businesses grappling with service disruptions.
The outage also had an impact on the websites of major Australian supermarket chains, Coles and Woolworths, causing them to go offline as well.
Azure’s status page revealed that the disruption was sparked by a utility power surge in the Australia East region, precisely around 08:30 UTC on August 30th.
“Impact Statement: Starting at approximately 08:30 UTC on 30 August 2023, a utility power surge in the Australia East region tripped a subset of the cooling units offline in one datacenter, within one of the Availability Zones. While working to restore cooling, temperatures in the datacenter increased so we proactively powered down a small subset of selected compute and storage scale units, to avoid damage to hardware. Multiple downstream services were impacted, with targeted communications being distributed via Azure Service Health.”
Coincidentally, Oracle’s cloud service also experienced a disruption around the same time. According to the Netsuite status page, a lightning storm caused an impact on the chiller plant within the AP Sydney data center.
“A lightning storm impacted the chiller plant in the AP Sydney data center and most systems were temporarily shut down to reduce temperatures. The temperatures have stabilized, and the systems are being systematically powered up. We anticipate that all services will be restored by 13:30 Pacific Time (Thursday 6:30 AM in Sydney).”
The aftermath of the outages saw both cloud providers working tirelessly to restore services to their users. After enduring a challenging 4.5 hours of downtime, the affected services gradually returned online.
