Microsoft has confirmed that a significant power outage at one of its West US data centers triggered widespread service disruptions yesterday, leaving thousands of Windows 11 users unable to access the Microsoft Store or complete Windows Updates.
The incident, which began early Saturday morning, highlights the fragility of centralized cloud infrastructure even amidst robust redundancy protocols.
The disruption began at approximately 08:00 UTC on February 7, 2026. Users across multiple regions, but specifically those relying on Azure services hosted in the West US region, began reporting timeouts and failures when attempting to download applications or fetch critical operating system patches.
In an official statement released shortly after the incident was flagged, Microsoft acknowledged the root cause: “A power outage at a datacenter is impacting customers’ ability to complete operations in the Microsoft Store and Windows Update.
As a result, some users may experience failures or timeouts when installing or updating Microsoft Store apps, or when downloading Windows updates.”
Azure storage clusters Impact
While the immediate consumer impact was felt on Windows 11 desktops, the backend failure was tied to a loss of utility power at a specific facility.
According to Microsoft’s preliminary post-incident report, the outage created a domino effect on Azure storage clusters that underpin the content delivery networks for the Store and Update services.
“Earlier today, an unexpected interruption to utility power at one of our West US datacenters resulted in a loss of power to parts of the facility,” the company stated in a status update. “Backup power systems were automatically activated, and power has since been stabilized across the affected areas.”
However, simply restoring electricity does not instantly restore complex cloud environments. The “cold start” of storage services and the re-synchronization of data across nodes takes considerable time. This latency explains why users continued to see error messages long after the lights were back on in the server room.
“Although power has been restored, service recovery is still in progress,” Microsoft warned. “Storage services are gradually returning online, and some customer impact may continue while recovery completes.”
Beyond the inability to download Candy Crush or the latest security definitions, enterprise administrators faced additional headaches regarding observability. The power loss degraded the telemetry pipelines that IT professionals use to monitor their own Azure resources.
The impact statement noted that customers might experience “intermittent service unavailability or delays in monitoring and log data for some resources hosted in the affected datacenter areas.” For DevOps teams relying on real-time logs to monitor application health, this delay meant flying blind for several hours while the monitoring infrastructure caught up with the backlog of data.
As of Sunday morning, February 8, Microsoft reports that the company is “actively working to restore full service reliability.” While the majority of services have come back online, some residual latency in the West US region is expected as storage arrays complete their consistency checks.
For general consumers encountering Error 0x80070002 or similar timeout codes in Windows Update today, the remediation strategy is simple: patience.
“Customers who are affected are advised to retry Microsoft Store and Windows Update operations later,” the company advised. IT administrators are encouraged to check the Azure Service Health dashboard for granular details regarding their specific tenants.
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