Please note that if you have a Windows Azure website, or use SQL Azure, your site may be experiencing downtime currently. 

Notice

I just called in regarding one of my public facing internet sites, because the site was failing to load anything but its error page, I couldn’t connect to the database to inspect application error logs, and the Windows Azure Management portal won’t load the SQL Azure extension.

After speaking to the representative, he also mentioned that they were also having some problems updating the Service Dashboard which shows service up/down time, and for now, they are posting messages at http://account.windowsazure.com.  Please note that this issue may only be effecting certain regions. 

Last, I may have misheard the representative, but he said that the outage was being categorized as a level 8, and if I heard correctly, I think he said that level 8 was the worst level.  I can’t say for sure on this though, because the phone connection to their support number was bad – large amounts of white noise.

Good Luck!

Update

It appears that this outage may also be effecting the following services: SQL Database, Service Bus, Datamarket, Windows Azure Marketplace, Shared Caching, Access Control 2.0, and SQL Reporting. The note on the account page says for the South Central US region, however, I believe the representative I spoke to also mentioned North Central. As I said before though, the connection was bad.

Update 2

My site regained connectivity about an hour ago, and it appears that the service dashboard is back in operation with correct status and history. It does appear that I misheard on the phone regarding multiple regions, so chances are this only effected a percentage of the platform. All in all, if this WAS their worst level of a problem, they really got it fixed and back up pretty fast. All in all, I understand that it is inherent for a complex system such as Azure to have ups and downs, but at the end of the day, I am still happy to support Azure to its fullest!