Bank of Queensland, Jetstar among Australian enterprises impacted by Azure outage

Bank of Queensland and Jetstar have emerged as a high-profile casualties of an Azure cloud outage in Australia that started last night.

The bank had problems with its app and with having transactions reflected in customers’ accounts since Wednesday evening, and said Thursday morning that recovery of the services was “taking longer than expected”.

It later confirmed recovery of its services at around 2.45pm on August 31.

A BOQ spokesperson told iTnews that the root cause of the issues was “a data centre outage, causing impacts to local services.”

The spokesperson did not specifically name Azure; however, iTnews understands the bank is exposed to an outage that affected the data centre hosting Azure’s Australia East region.

“BOQ Group is working to restore services in full. Customer transfers, transactions and account balances may take several hours to update,” the spokesperson said.

“We apologise for any inconvenience this has caused.

“We’ll continue to keep our customers updated via our website and social media channels.”

Jetstar also suffered an outage of its website in the same timeframe, leaving customers unable to log in to manage bookings or check in for flights.

Passengers at airports also reported issues with "onboarding systems".

The airline said in various social posts that an "IT issue" led to an "unexpected outage" of its web properties; iTnews understands the airline's issues related to the Azure failure.

Microsoft has acknowledged the problems with its Australia East region, which started at about 6.30pm Sydney time on August 30.

“A utility power surge in the Australia East region tripped a subset of the cooling units offline in one data centre, within one of the Availability Zones,” the vendor said in a post-incident report.

“While working to restore cooling, temperatures in the data centre increased so we proactively powered down a small subset of selected compute and storage scale units, to avoid damage to hardware. 

“Multiple downstream services were impacted.”

Microsoft said it had recovered most of its storage services and virtual machines affected by the shutdown, but indicated some “individual downstream services” - i.e. those of customers - were yet to recover.

“At this stage, we believe most downstream services that are still experiencing impact are the result of dependencies on one of three services with investigations ongoing,” Microsoft said.

Microsoft said that “a small number” of resources had been thermally damaged in the incident and were in the process of being repaired or replaced.

This work was necessary to “bring the remaining impacted storage accounts back online,” the vendor said.

The same incident also appeared to be behind an outage of SAP's cloud-based HR software, SuccessFactors, in Australia.