Microsoft Details Azure Preparation for Hurricane Florence

Microsoft is battening down the hatches of its Azure infrastructure in advance of Hurricane Florence's approach to the U.S. East Coast.

As of Thursday afternoon, Florence was a Category 2 hurricane that was pounding the Carolinas from offshore with damaging waves and high winds that have already left tens of thousands of customers without power. The U.S. National Weather Service was forecasting that the storm would make landfall sometime late Thursday or early Friday with a storm surge equivalent to a higher-category hurricane, followed by catastrophic amounts of rain.

In a blog post on the Microsoft Azure site on Wednesday, Jeremy Hollett, partner engineering manager, Azure CXP, detailed the company's preparations to protect both customers and Microsoft's people.

"Our datacenters (US East, US East 2, and US Gov Virginia) have been reviewed internally and externally to ensure that we are prepared for this weather event. Our onsite teams are prepared to switch to generators if utility power is unavailable or unreliable. All our emergency operating procedures have been reviewed by our team members across the datacenters, and we are ensuring that our personnel have all necessary supplies throughout the event," Hollett said.

Hollett said primary communications channels for updates would be on the original blog post, through the Twitter handle @AzureSupport or on the Azure Service Health section of the Azure portal.

The hurricane is hitting a little over a week after a major outage for Azure and other Microsoft cloud services that resulted from a lightning strike that damaged infrastructure in the San Antonio, Texas-based South Central US datacenter. Microsoft released an after-action report detailing the causes and lessons learned from that incident earlier this week.