Microsoft has confirmed to El Reg that it will cough up service credits for customers walloped by the recent Azure outage.

Under its T&Cs, Redmond offers financially backed service level agreements (SLAs) covering its cloud portfolio, and previously dished out credit notes to BPOS users for a seven-hour blackout in the summer.

The Azure platform went down for more than nine hours last week thanks to a software bug; although the final "root cause analysis" is progressing, a time calculation that tripped up on February's leap day appears to be at fault, Microsoft said.

Customers of Azure Compute and Content Delivery Network (CDN) availability services can expect a 10 per cent credit note for uptime lower than 99.95 per cent availability and 25 per cent for anything below 99 per cent in a month.

The SLAs for Azure Storage, SQL Azure, Access Control, Caching or Service Bus commit to a 10 per cent credit note when uptime falls below 99.9 per cent availability and 25 per cent in instances lower than 99 per cent.

In a brief statement Microsoft said: “We will compensate customers for the outage based on existing Service Level Agreements.”

The software giant, gearing up for its Windows 8 launch, added it will confirm the reasons for the outage within the next couple of days. ®