A system configuration mistake caused the outage that affected Windows Azure customers in western Europe last week. Microsoft didn’t say how many customers were impacted. Microsoft is patching the identified bugs in the networking hardware devices, which triggered bugs in some of the cluster’s hardware devices. Forrester Research analyst James Staten said PaaS (platform as a service) clouds such as Azure are very complex and highly automated environments. “Far worse things are more common in a typical enterprise data center,” Staten said.”]