Western European customers of cloud-based compute services on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud had trouble accessing their virtual machines running at Microsoft’s data centers in Europe for about two hours on Thursday.

“We are experiencing an availability issue in the West Europe sub-region,” a Microsoft representative wrote in a status update in Azure’s online service-status dashboard. “We are actively investigating this issue and working to resolve it as soon as possible.”

The availability issues started around 11am GMT, and Microsoft reported it had restored full service functionality around 1:30pm on the service-status dashboard.

Microsoft did not specify the cause of the disruption, saying only that storage accounts and running applications had not been affected by the incident.

Google Talk goes mute

Users of Google’s online chat service Talk experienced problems with the service starting around 3:40am PDT Thursday. Google said users could access Talk but saw error messages and experienced unexpected behavior.

About five hours later, in an update on the App Status Dashboard, Google said the problem had been resolved, but did not specify what had caused it.

Twitter down briefly

Not much information is available on the short Twitter outage on Thursday morning, as much of the information about outages that does come out usually comes out on Twitter. The company’s spokesperson confirmed to the Associated Press that there had been an issue with the service but did not provide any details.

Twitter was down as of 11:40am EDT, according to GigaOm. The service was working normally as of 1:50pm.