Microsoft detailed Wednesday just what exactly went on in its data centers that led to its Azure cloud experiencing a series of hiccups on Tuesday.

Microsoft attributed the problem to an Azure Storage performance update, which inadvertently led to to “an issue that resulted in storage blob front ends going into an infinite loop,” wrote Jason Zander, [company]Microsoft[/company] corporate vice president of Azure, in a blog post.

From Zander’s post:
[blockquote person=”Microsoft” attribution=”Microsoft”]Yesterday evening Pacific Standard Time, Azure storage services experienced a service interruption across the United States, Europe and parts of Asia, which impacted multiple cloud services in these regions. I want to first sincerely apologize for the disruption this has caused. We know our customers put their trust in us and we take that very seriously.[/blockquote]

This infinite loop problem meant that storage blobs — essentially, bundled up collections of binary data — were unable to handle…