It’s been a pretty heavy week for the cloud, with three major providers suffering outages of varying severity, giving us another reminder that no cloud is perfect.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud was down across Western Europe for approximately two and a half hours, with a flag on the Azure service dashboard stating:

“We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region, which impacts access to hosted services in this region. We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible”.

Indeed, the situation was eventually resolved with full service functionality restored. Similar problems were experienced in the West US region concerning management degradation; this took just over four hours to rectify.

This isn’t the first time Windows Azure has felt the wrath of the cloud gods. Back in February Microsoft’s cloudy outing was down for several hours, and during …