As severe thunderstorms moved across the southern states of America, the tech giants data centre based in Texas was subject to lightning strikes that caused voltage spikes which overloaded their cooling infrastructure. With temperatures in the facility rising rapidly, they were faced with either shutting everything down or watching their systems cook in the heat.
Automated procedures designed to protect data and hardware integrity went into action. This put their systems and services into a structured shutdown which knocked out services, databases and virtual machines across the Azure cloud. The knock on effects were felt well beyond North America, with users in Europe reporting problems for much of the following day.
After the storms passed, Microsoft engineer began working to restore the power and get services back up and running as quickly as possible with most services back to normal by the end of Wednesday.
You can read more about this incident here.