The UK government's newly launched CloudStore, which is a catalogue of approved cloud services and providers for public sector organisations, failed after problems with its hosting provider, Microsoft Azure.

A Microsoft spokesperson said at the time that customers in the US and Europe were down in what is a significant cloud outage. Engineering teams developed and deployed a fix that resolved the issue for the majority of our customers although some customers in three sub-regions, North Central US, South Central and North Europe, remain out of service.

Microsoft said there are continuing issues for some customers. The problem appears to have been caused by the fact that Microsoft software could not recognise the leap year.  It did not take long to fix, but it is a little embarrassing for Redmond because Cloud-based services are dependant on their reliability.

Last year, Amazon's EC2 cloud service and Microsoft's BPOS online desktop application suite both suffered outages that lasted several days. These were due to lightning storms.