FormsByAir was impacted by a major global outage with Microsoft Azure this morning, preventing access to our website, portal and all forms hosted on our platform.
Our monitoring indicates that this started around 5am NZT. We created an incident on our status page at 7.35am NZT, providing additional updates as available from Microsoft.
We observed close to normal service from 9.30am NZT, with sporadic requests and slow-downs up until midday. Microsoft have now flagged this issue as fully mitigated.
The cause of the issue per Microsoft was an inadvertent update to Azure Front Door. This is a critical service that sits in front of our web servers for edge caching, SSL offloading and protection against attack. Perhaps the bigger issue was the time involved in recovering from the issue once identified, something I'm sure Microsoft will be reviewing closely.
We looked at temporarily routing traffic around Front Door, but considered the risk of such a change to outweigh the benefit, particularly as things started coming back online from 9.30am onwards.
We will of course review our architecture in the wake of this event, and seek guidance from Microsoft and others. This is an ongoing challenge for all online services. We've had almost 100% uptime for the last 2 years, and continue to have confidence in Microsoft and Azure.