Azure VM Resource Health

Question

Your virtual machine is unavailable at the moment. Please check back in a few minutes for any updates we find on the source of the unavailability of this VM. No additional action is required from you at this time. I cannot access my VM due to the above message, what do we do in this case....?

Answer 1

Thapo Mokoena hi there, thanks for posting this,

first off, dont panic! azure's resource health is already checking things on their end. but lets speed things up a bit. Try hitting the 'refresh' button in the azure portal. sometimes its just a hiccup in the status update. if that doesnt work, go to the 'resource health' blade for ur vm. it often gives clearer details than the main dashboard. MSFT how to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/service-health/resource-health-overview

check ur activity log too. it might show if something triggered the outage, like a platform update or scaling event. u can find it right there in the portal under 'monitor'.

reboot the vm if u can. yes, the classic 'turn it off and on again' move )) if u cant access the portal, use azure cli with az vm restart or powershell with restart azurermvm. command reference https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/vm?view=azure-cli-latest#az-vm-restart

peek at ur network config. sometimes its not the vm but a sneaky nsg rule or expired dns. this might help in other tools too, like aws or gcp. worth looking into!

if this keeps happening, set up alerts. azure can notify u before things go sideways next time. u can use action groups to ping ur phone or email. how https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/alerts/action-groups

hope this gets u back up and running,

rgds,

Alex

Answer 2

Hi Thapo Mokoena,

It appears that your virtual machine is currently unavailable, and Azure’s monitoring systems have detected this unavailability. This scenario typically indicates that the VM has undergone automatic failover, which is triggered to preserve service availability.

Automatic failover may occur due to several reasons, including:

Software bugs or infrastructure faults (compute, network, or storage issues)

Power outages impacting Azure resources

Unplanned maintenance by the Azure platform

Host server reboot or remote disk connectivity loss

To investigate further:

1. Check the Resource Health section in the Azure portal for your VM.
   • This will show any recent platform events that affected your VM.
   • Root cause analysis, if available, is typically published within 72 hours.

If the VM remains unavailable or the issue persists beyond expected recovery time, feel free to tag me in the comments!