Just in time to fuel the chatter at Microsoft's Mix Internet conference in Las Vegas, the preview of the company's Windows Azure cloud-computing platform suffered its first big outage over the weekend, lasting about 22 hours. See the play-by-play in this MSDN forum post.

As reported by the Register, the company can take comfort in the fact that it's hardly the only cloud-computing provider to experience significant outages. "Microsoft wanted to offer people the full cloud experience. Well, now it has," writes the Register's Gavin Clarke.

But you can bet this is something Microsoft will be looking to avoid as it starts to roll out Azure more broadly. Microsoft's Steve Marx writes in the forum thread that the Azure team will be conducting an analysis "to understand exactly what went wrong and what we need to do to ensure it doesn't happen again."

However, he adds, the results of that analysis probably won't be available publicly until after the Mix conference is over.

(Via LiveSide.net)