Microsoft Azure is having an up-and-down kind of day as the cloud platform struggles to get any work done.

The services' dashboard reported that hosted services in Western Europe were hit, and said that Microsoft was "actively investigating the issue" at 12.09 BST.

Two hours later, the status page said the firm was still troubleshooting, gathering data and verifying the most probable cause for the outage. It added that storage accounts would not be affected.

Readers told The Reg that the service was drifting in and out.

The last platform outage for Azure was in February this year when the cloud crashed on a leap-year bug. ®