In a recent blog post, coming after the last-week outage of Windows Azure Storage, Microsoft's Steven Martin said that the software company will refund the outage-affected Windows Azure customers.

Citing the reason behind Microsoft's decision to refund the Windows Azure customers affected by the outage which was caused due to an expired SSL certificate, Martin said in the brief blog post the scope of the disruption had prompted the refund move by the company.

With the 12-hour Windows Azure Storage outage having led to disruption of at least 52 services - including Xbox Live - on Thursday night and Friday, Martin said that a root cause analysis (RCA) of the outage was being carried out by Microsoft, so that similar outages could be prevented in future. Martin also added that the RCA will be posted on the blog as soon as it becomes available.

About the steps being taken by Microsoft and the refund to Windows Azure customers, Martin said in the blog post that the company had "executed the repair steps to update the SSL certificate on the impacted clusters and availability was restored to 99% worldwide by 1:00 AM PST on February 23."

Further adding that full restoration was completed at 8:00 PM PST the same day; Martin said: "Given the scope of the outage, we will proactively provide credits to impacted customers in accordance with our SLA. The credit will be reflected on a subsequent invoice."