In July, Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud-based service
experienced an extended amount of downtime in Western Europe. The company apologized for the issue, which caused servers in Dublin, Ireland and Amsterdam to shut down for just over 2 1/2 hours.
This week, Microsoft posted up a more detailed explanation about what happened to cause the Azure outage. In a
post on the official Azure blog, the company said the problem was related to a "safety valve mechanism" that, when in normal use, is suppose to limit the number of connections that the Azure server hardware can accept if any "potential cascading networking failures" occur.
