And here's the official word on the Azure outage.

And here’s the official word on the Azure outage.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazure/archive/2013/03/01/details-of-the-february-22nd-2013-windows-azure-storage-disruption.aspx

“However, the team failed to flag the storage service release as a release that included certificate updates. Subsequently, the release of the storage service containing the time critical certificate updates was delayed behind updates flagged as higher priority, and was not deployed in time to meet the certificate expiration deadline. Additionally, because the certificate had already been updated in the Secret Store, no additional alerts were presented to the team, which was a gap in our alerting system.”