Visual Studio Online hit by another major outage
Microsoft Corp’s Visual Studio Online service for software developers was hit by its second major outage in the space of a month yesterday, and was inaccessible to users for about four hours. Microsoft has since blamed the snafu on problems with its database.
Visual Studio Online was launched in November last year, coinciding with the general release of Visual Studio 2013. The service is hosted on its Azure cloud, and there are a variety of subscription levels available. The service also comes bundled together with several premium MSDN packages.
The program comes with several cloud-based enhancements, including a hosted build service, source code version control, a basic online code-editing environment, load testing and telemetry data that can be used to gain insights on app stability and performance.
Sadly, the stability of Visual Studio Online itself leaves a lot to be desired. The outage began at around 7.30am Pacific Time yesterday, which was when the first reports of users having difficulty accessing the service, and performance issues, were reported. Not long after, the Azure service status page revealed a “multi-region full service interruption” affecting Visual Studio Online.
Microsoft’s DevOps engineers spent about an hour rooting around to try and find the cause of the issue, before deciding to roll back some changes made to Azure’s infrastructure in the previous 24 hours. That’s apparently put everything ship-shape again, although Microsoft still isn’t sure exactly what caused it.
“The actual root cause is still under investigation, but initial investigation is indicating a contention in our core database seems to be causing blocking and performance issues in the services,” it wrote on Visual Studio Online service blog. “Our DevOps teams have identified a couple of mitigation steps and currently going thru validations.”
Visual Studio Online was last hit by a significant outage on July 18 which lasted for around 90 minutes. In that case the problem proved easier to find, with Microsoft blaming it on an Azure SQL database glitch. Back in February, Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry blogged about the growing pains being experienced by the service, which included a run of “bad” deployments that led to “unacceptable” downtime.
As of this morning, Visual Studio Online appears to be working normally.
photo credit: Several seconds via photopin cc
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