Microsoft Dynamics CRM Solution Provider Victimized by Windows Azure Provisioning Calamity

Sometimes cloud technology fails us.  And other times, the people and organizations that manage the cloud fail us.  Such was the case yesterday afternoon as Microsoft Dynamics CRM marketing automation service provider  ClickDimensions found itself the innocent victim of an administrative mistake by the Windows Azure provisioning team that left them with a cancelled Azure account, bringing down service for all of its customers with no advanced notice.

The good news for ClickDimensions and its customers is that service has apparently been fully restored following twelve hours of recovery work. The bad news, obviously, is that the company just had to live through the pain of watching some of its core technology infrastructure vanish into thin air as its service provider demonstrated a major point of weakness in its administrative processes. 

In an actively-updated blog post detailing their efforts to resolve the situation over the course of the outage, ClickDimensions staff explain that the issue stemmed from a billing mistake made by the Azure service team earlier this year that seems to have been incorrectly resolved, leading to the unexpected account cancellation.   

As ClickDimensions understands it, the issue began at 2:45pm ET on January 25 when the Azure provisioning team's administrative error kicked in, cancelling their account.  The marketing automation firm began escalating issue with the Azure support team and their blog post details a timeline how they spent the next seven hours pushing the Microsoft support engineers for as many status updates as they could get, even posting updates  via their blog when they weren't getting enough communication from Microsoft.

By 9:46pm, recovery efforts reached a milestone and over the next five hours ...