Microsoft commits to expanding Azure Availability Zones in 2021 and beyond Microsoft is growing its Azure Availability Zone footprint significantly in this calendar year and beyond to provide broader datacenter failure protection. March 17, 2021 -- 16:57 GMT (09:57 PDT) | Topic: Cloud Microsoft announced Azure Availability Zones for datacenter-failure protection in March 2018, starting with US Central and France Central. Availability Zones are located inside Azure regions and offer independent power source, networking, and cooling. Microsoft officials have said there is a minimum of three separate zone locations in enabled regions, which offer 99.99% uptime service-level agreements on covered services. Last fall, Gartner researchers dinged Microsoft for having what it said was the lowest ratio of availability zones to regions of any vendor in its category, and added that only a limited set of Microsoft services supported the availability-zone model. Since then, Microsoft has been expanding its availability-zone footprint, adding more support in Canada, Australia, and, as of this week, Brazil. Officials also said today that Microsoft would have Availability Zone support for all foundational and mainstream services by the end of 2021.