Microsoft Cloud expands in Norway just as Northern Europe Azure services go down for 5 hours

Arif Bacchus

Azure Servers

Microsoft yesterday announced plans two new data centers in Norway. One of the centers will be in the Stavanger area, another in Oslo, but both mark the first time that Microsoft will have data centers in the region.

The new data centers are expected to go online by late 2019 and will start with the availability of Azure, and then Office 365 and Dynamics 365 later in the year. According to Microsoft, both data centers demonstrate “ambitions to meet increasing customer demand for cloud.”

In the words of  Jason Zander, Executive Vice President, Microsoft Azure.

Over a billion customers around the world trust the intelligent Microsoft Cloud to provide a platform to help transform their businesses… By delivering the Microsoft Cloud from new datacentre regions in Norway, organisations will be empowered through cloud-scale innovation while meeting their data residency, security and compliance needs

Microsoft has had a presence in Norway since 1990, with 600 people working in offices in Lysaker, Oslo, Trondheim, and Tromsø. The new data centers build on this and should also bring innovation across the oil, gas, and other industries in the public sector.

The announcement of these new data centers happened on the same day that Microsoft Azure Europe went down for over five hours. Britain’s The Register reports that the outage was caused by underlying temperature issues in storage and networking systems.