Microsoft Windows Azure is Back after 'Leap Year' Outage.

Microsoft's Azure cloud service has stabilized and is running more smoothly after suffering from a series of outages on Wednesday, PC World reported.

Our recovery efforts to restore computer service to impacted customers in this sub-region are complete, Microsoft said in a message on the site. However, a small number of customers in this sub-region may face long delays during service management operations, it added.

An investigation into the outage found that the glitch was caused as a result of the leap year. While final root cause analysis is in progress, this issue appears to be due to a time calculation that was incorrect for the leap year, wrote Bill Laing VP for server and cloud wrote in a blog.

Once the bug was discovered, Microsoft immediately took the steps to protect customer's services that were already running, which created a block for incoming requests to use the service, according to Information Week.

The fix was successfully deployed to most of the Windows Azure sub-regions and we restored Windows Azure service availability to the majority of our customers and services by 2:57 a.m. PST, or a little over nine hours later, Microsoft's Laing wrote.

Microsoft continues to look into the root cause of the problem and said it would update its customer through its blog. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused, it said in a statement.

Customers who are still suffering from service problems have taken to Azure help forums to vent their frustrations.

I think we could have lost 2 prospects who are testing our system currently, one wrote on the forum. But I can't imagine the damage this has done to companies with large scale customers. I mean we have chosen Windows Azure due to the redundancy.....How can we explain this to our customers?