Disclaimer: ex-Windows Azure person, no insider knowledge on this particular outage That's typically because the 'service management service' typically kicks i

Disclaimer: ex-Windows Azure person, no insider knowledge on this particular outage That's typically because the 'service management service' typically kicks in when it needs to do things - allocate capacity, restart things when stuff goes down, etc. By default, it isn't touching the running apps inside VMs. There is no Windows Azure equivalent to Heroku's routing mesh to be taken down; the requests go to the VMs directly via the various networking layers.