A broken fiber optic cable has cut the connection between Microsoft’s data centers in the Netherlands. All Azure cloud services are now fully operational again.

Summer storm Poly raged across the Netherlands yesterday. Microsoft also reported the misery: Due to the storm, a fiber optic cable broke, which interrupted the network connection between two data centers. This resulted in unstable connections, higher latencies, or certain services that stopped working properly for customers, such as Azure Databricks. The problems started around 9:30 am.

By 6 p.m. Microsoft had restored all affected cloud services. The Azure status page reports that everything is back to normal in the Western Europe region today, although Microsoft is paying close attention to see if there are any problems after the storm. It is still unclear how the fiber optic cable was damaged. Microsoft promises to release a comprehensive incident report within 72 hours.

Extreme weather conditions can cause problems for data center infrastructure. Google recently experienced a major outage at one of its data centers in Paris due to water damage. Due to the heavy rain, the hardware in the data center came into contact with water.