February 29 was considered quite lucky by some people since it happens only every four years.  Couple’s wed on that date because Feng Shui stated that their marriage would be prosperous.  But some people disagree, just ask some Windows Azure users: they experienced a service outage on that date which was detrimental to business and personal lives.

To appease those affected by the outage, and even those who didn’t even have a clue that there was a problem, Microsoft officials announced last March 9 that all customers of Azure Compute, Access Control, Service Bus, and Caching will get the credit for the entire billing months for its services.

If you’re still puzzled as to what happened on that fateful day, Bill Laing, the head of Microsoft’s server and cloud team, explains that:

“The leap day bug immediately triggered at 4:00PM PST, February 28th (00:00 UST February 29th) when GAs (guest agents) in new VMs tried to generate certificates. Storage clusters were not affected because they don’t run with a GA, but normal application deployment, scale-out and service healing would have resulted in new VM creation. At the same time many clusters were also in the midst of the rollout of a new version of the FC (fabric controller), HA (host agent) and GA.”

Microsoft is now doing everything they can to prevent any time/date-related bug from causing any problems in the future.

Aside from giving credit to current Azure users, Microsoft already slashed the price on their service last Friday.  Windows Azure Storage Pay-As-You-Go pricing has been reduced by 12% ($0.14 to $0.125); 6 Month Plans for Windows Azure Storage have been reduced across all tiers by up to 14%; Windows Azure Extra Small Compute has been reduced by 50% ($.04 to .$02).