SQL Database - West Europe - Mitigation Confirmed

Impact Statement: Between 03:47 UTC and 19:45 UTC on 21 Jul 2022, customers using SQL Database in West Europe may have experienced issues accessing services. During this time, new connections to databases in this region may have resulted in errors or timeouts. Existing connections should have remained available to accept new requests, however if those connections were terminated and then re-established, they may have failed. Preliminary Root Cause: We identified a recent configuration change to metadata drop operations which resulted in the access issues described above. Mitigation: We reverted the configuration change, successively across all impacted servers, which mitigated the issue. As an additional step, we also performed a restart of the dependent gateway nodes, which helped to accelerate reducing error rates. While third-party SQL customers were fully recovered by 13:30 UTC, we continued to validate that reverting the configuration change did not have any unforeseen consequences, and supported first-party SQL customers to validate their own recoveries, ultimately confirming full mitigation by 18:45 UTC. Next Steps: We will continue to investigate to establish the full root cause and prevent future occurrences. Stay informed about Azure service issues by creating custom service health alerts:  https://aka.ms/ash-videos for video tutorials and  https://aka.ms/ash-alerts for how-to documentation.