After a Microsoft data center in Texas failed, causing an outage in the Azure cloud service on Tuesday, the company has issued a software update to its servers, which caused further problems with users of services including Skype and Office 365.

The imperfect update, rolled out while Azure users in the US and globally were still suffering, meant that users of Microsoft products including Skype and Office 365 experienced errors due including messages saying their service was being throttled.. The errors, which began at around 5:30 PM UTC on Wednesday, September 5, should now be mostly resolved.

Microsoft's South Central US facility experienced problems during severe weather "including lightning strikes," which overloaded its cooling systems and caused its servers to automatically shut down.

Feeling throttled

"As part of our follow-up remediation actions stemming from the issue reported under service incident MO147606 [the outage], an update was introduced to the components that manage authentication," says a note to customers first reported by The Register.

"We've determined that this update has resulted in users receiving a message indicating they are being throttled when attempting to access Outlook and Skype. We're reverting the update to remediate the problem."

It adds: "Scope of impact: This issue could potentially affect any of your users intermittently if they are routed through the affected infrastructure." Users across the US, Canada and Europe report seeing the throttling error.

Reports indicate that the error has mostly been addressed, although Azure as a whole is still struggling with the wider impact of the Texan data center outage.