In what could be deemed as a potentially negative impact on Microsoft's desires to be a leading supplier of cloud based services, the company's popular cloud computing platform Azure has fallen victim to a seemingly serious outage - lasting for a total of 8 consecutive hours.

As reported by the Register, the Azure service was not live yet as of approximately 10:30 GMT on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Azure customers at the receiving end of this outage have started questioning how such an important service could go down for such a prolonged period of time.

Understanding the potential damage it could cause to the company and the service's reputation, Microsoft has been proactively updating the customers on the issue ever since the outage started.

"We are experiencing an issue with Windows Azure service management. Customers will not be able to carry out service management operations," Microsoft explained, according to The Register report.

A little while later, the company updated its customers by stating: "We have identified the root cause of this incident. It has been traced back to a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT".