Microsoft Azure, or at least the part of it that handles the OpenAI service in the Sweden Central region, was down and out for the count yesterday, leaving users facing errors for much of the working day.

Microsoft first acknowledged the issues at 0900 UTC (although the status page for the service stated it spotted the problem at 0922 UTC). At the time, Microsoft blamed the Azure OpenAI Service's availability issues on "an unhealthy backend dependent service, which led to cascading failures."

The Windows behemoth noted problems when using modes such as GPT-5.2, GPT-5 Mini, GPT-4.1, and related APIs.

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The team took mitigating steps, Microsoft said. In other words, that old IT standby was deployed, and the offending IRM service was turned off and turned back on again at 1236 UTC.

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The problem didn't go away. At 1246 UTC, Microsoft said pods were crashing with out-of-memory errors in the Sweden cluster. It began scaling out nodes in the cluster "to improve request handling and resilience" and at 1530 UTC began increasing the memory available to the pods, which completed at 1553 UTC.

Finally, at 1612 UTC, when many Swedes were shutting down for the day, Microsoft confirmed the problem had been resolved.

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While Microsoft's transparency in acknowledging the problem is to be applauded, the length of time it took to deal with what appears to be a software issue is not.

One wag [8]commented on social media: "EU resilience is getting another live exercise," while others [9]treated it as a learning experience : "Used this as a forcing function: deployed to multiple regions with automatic failover."

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"Lesson: Don't wait for production to break to build resilience."

And, because it's Sweden, " [11]"Azure OAI Sweden Central is borked! "

It's back up and running today, but Azure's OpenAI Service choking on a Swedish meatball and taking a working day to recover is not a good look for a company keen for customers to make full use of its AI services. ®

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[11] https://x.com/janaka_a/status/2016159223634129256

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