Azure North Europe downed by the curse of the Irish – sunshine Amid forecasts of heat and fears of water shortage in Ireland on Monday, Microsoft was about to confront a drought of a different kind: an Azure service outage. The disruption, which lasted from 1744 UTC on Tuesday, June 19 to 0430 UTC on Wednesday, June 20, downed a slew of services, as we previously reported. What was not …
"This unexpected rise in humidity levels in the operational areas caused multiple Top of Rack (TORs) network devices and hard disk drives supporting two Storage scale units in the region to experience hardware component failures," the status page explains.
Translated into human language the air drier failed and the humidity reached 100% condensing. In fact, even that does not sound right as 100% condensing exiting the aircon stops being 100% the moment it reaches anything moderately warm. So there was literally water in the air for this to happen.
Something bizarre was going on, and I think we're getting half a story (as ever). I don't see merely high humidity causing that amount of failure. I idly wonder if some sort of local cooling device in the racks had water condensing on it in such quantities it was overflowing into the IT kit.
Having just repaired my refrigerator/freezer, I feel qualified to offer a *possible* explanation, as a mental placeholder until the facts come out.
Most such cooling systems would require a defrost cycle, to melt away the accumulation of ice from the evaporator. If the system fails, perhaps because the thermostat part number 12001937 has gone open circuit after some years of service, then the evaporator will eventually ice up and the entire cooling system will need to go off-line for many hours to be manually defrosted.
If they've failed to repair the defrost system, then the ice up will repeat and they'll be shut down a 2nd time.
One cheap part can take out the whole system.
"probably an issue with the implementation of the en-IE language pack for Office 365 and/or Cortana which resulted in "air conditioner" autocorrected or understood as "hair conditioner" when the ordering was done..."
If it was an en-IE language pack, would it not have ordered Eire conditioner?
(AC because....)
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Oh yes, Freedom Units indeed, because an obsolete temperature scale invented by a Northern European (Fahrenheit was apparently Dutch-German-Polish) is much more aligned with freedom than a current temperature scale developed from a Swede's ideas.
Yeah, let's stick it to the man and make a stand for Liberty by using a temperature scale that's not in line with current international measurement standards! What could possibly go wrong, using obsolete measurement units which have long been abandoned by most of the world? <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_failure>
I wonder how hot it got in there! My little rack in my shed is currently 42'C in the nice weather we're having (28'C in my garden in Essex at the mo) and I have four PCs, switch, home theatre amp and a CCTV DVR unit in there and they're all running fine. The APC UPS is emailing me every minute with an over temperature alarm but it's still working. The Cisco 2960 switch fans are screaming but it's also working fine.
The Fahrenheit temperature scale is entirely of European origin.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736) was born in Danzig/Gdańsk, but lived most of his life in the Dutch Republic. (--Wikipedia)
Also it allows more precision, having nearly twice (9/5) the number of increments.
(Recalling that accuracy is the truth of your measurement, whilst precision is how closely it can be repeated.)
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