Reports of Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform having a bad day apparently cannot be exaggerated enough—customers are reporting that the system has been all-but-entirely offline for hours.

According to The Register, the problems began around 9 p.m. ET on February 28 and have continued up through the waning hours of the morning on February 29. The article has been updated to mention that it’s been dark for about seven hours and it continues to show spotty trouble for many customers attempting to use the cloud-service. Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet has chronicled the glimmer of light coming back to Azure’s systems. Although it seems to still be amidst a rough patch.

ZDNet UK reported that the initial Azure problems emanated from “an outage in the Windows Azure Management Service technology, which then spread to the Windows Azure Compute and Access Control parts of the platform.”

And a Microsoft Azure spokesperson was quick to reach the lines and speak to the problem occurring,

“OnFebruary 28th, 2012at 5:45 PM PST Microsoft became aware of an issue impacting Windows Azure service management in a number of regions.  Windows Azure engineering teams developed, validated and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers. Some customers in 3 sub regions – North Central US, South Central andNorth Europe– remain affected.  Engineering teams are actively working to resolve the issue as soon as possible  We will update the Service Dashboard, hourly until this incident is resolved.”

It looks like the problem might be due to a leap year issue, according to an article on Data Center Knowledge,

Microsoft said the Azure service management problems were caused by a “a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012″ – presumably a date-related glitch with a security certificate triggered by the onset of the Feb. 29th “Leap Day” which occurs once every four years. The Azure team deployed a software update to fix the problem, which was rolled out gradually. Microsoft said management functions were “restored for the majority of customers” by 1:30 pm GMT (8:30 am Eastern).

It’s not quite the Y2K bug, but it’s certainly a bit embarrassing for something that would roll around every four years (except for century years.)

Cloud outages can have dramatic effects in this era of software-as-a-service and where companies offload their processing power into the cloud, we’ve seen as much when Amazon’s E2C cloud darkened in April 2011 (on the anniversary of the rise of Skynet in the Terminator TV series); or when Google and Microsoft both faced outages in September 2011 dimming the lights for Hotmail, Office 365, and SkyDrive.

We live in an era where a minor glitch can expand to dramatic proportions if it’s not carefully partitioned and protected that can affect a multitude of enterprise customers.

Readers can certainly look forward to a postmortem here on SiliconANGLE after Microsoft Azure gets their systems up and running again.