Windows VMs won't start because the GuestAgent extension can't be found

Sergey Borovoy 541

Hi, I have a bunch of Windows Server 2019 VMs and they were working fine just yesterday, but this morning none of them can be started. Provisioning state becomes "failed" and the error message is "No version found in the artifact repository that satisfies the requested version '' for VM extension with publisher 'Microsoft.WindowsAzure.GuestAgent' and type 'CRPProd'"

So I called a colleague who also has a bunch of similar Windows Server VMs in a different subscription (created independently, those are not copies of my VMs) and he has the same problem.

Looks like some kind of Azure outage, GuestAgent extension became inaccessible? On the other had, I'm worried about the fact that the requested version is shown as an empty string. If this is what my VM requests for some reason, no wonder it can't find it.

The region is Western Europe, in case it matters.

Tried googling the error message, nothing really useful.

I'll appreciate your help.

Sushant Potdar 21 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:44:27.223+00:00

Facing same issue since last 3-4 hours.
Sushant Potdar 21 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:44:41.463+00:00

Facing same issue since last 3-4 hours.
Mark N | Sterling 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:53:22.11+00:00

Same here, all our VM's are in a failed state this morning. West Europe region (UK)
No idea how to resolve
Sumit Waghmare 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:53:43.577+00:00

Wow! same issue, I was troubleshooting and trying to create new VM
Central India
Waldo Nel 51 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:55:40.777+00:00

Exact same issue in South Africa North. Been like this for about 2 hours now
Terho Antila 46 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:02:19.59+00:00

I have the same problem. Tweeted and mentioned @AzureSupport. https://twitter.com/terhoantila/status/1448193642947137536
Rohan Raj Kumar Saini 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:02:57.233+00:00

Same here in India
Mike Honey 236 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:04:50.703+00:00

Azure Support just acknowledged this issue on twitter
https://twitter.com/AzureSupport/status/1448195809728675840?s=20

Same here - US West 2
Marius van Deventer 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:08:54.67+00:00

Same, logged a MS Ticket. Super annoying.
Harsha Amarasiri 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:09:56.163+00:00

Facing the exact same issue.
Jan Mahmud 1 Reputation point

2021-10-13T08:15:10.75+00:00

Same issue in UK South and UK West
Piet Baarssen 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:21:06.613+00:00

Same problem here WEU region
VGP 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:22:53.667+00:00

Have the same problem. We've multiple VMs in East US region. But one works one doesn't. Is this VM specific, can anyone let us know.
VGP 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:23:05.957+00:00

Have the same problem. We've multiple VMs in East US region. But one works one doesn't. Is this VM specific, can anyone let us know.
Ricardo Salvador 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:24:25.24+00:00

Same problem here! (West Europe)
Ricardo Salvador 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:24:36.773+00:00

Same problem here! (West Europe)
Stanev, Vladimir (DFSaaS) 16 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:25:21.173+00:00

Absolutely the same. The machines cannot be turned on, once they are turned off. Do not turn off the machines, otherwise you'll lose them for now.
Anna Moser 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:25:35.287+00:00

Same issue for
MicrosoftWindowsServer
2019-datacenter-gensecond, datacenter-core-20h2-with-containers-smalldisk, 2022-datacenter-core-smalldisk-g2
deployments on germany west central

all our custom images are also affected.
Abhijit DebRoy 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:28:20.857+00:00

It's been 1 hour and we are getting the same error, East US location. VMs could not be restarted or redeployed.
Gary Neilson 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:42:22+00:00

Same on the official status page: https://status.azure.com/en-gb/status
Naganand Kanagal 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:49:48.043+00:00

I have the same issue, I tried to restart a VM that I had created yesterday in the SEAsia region. Glad I found this thread.
Olivier Vanekem 81 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:57:14.363+00:00

As many we also are impacted for regions West Europe and East US.
Waiting for the fix... (and considering multi-cloud redundancy in the future...)
Bryon Brill 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:59:06.417+00:00

Someone Deployed some code, and it messed with the existing VM's. I'm certain they are in the process of rolling or reverting it back to previous state. It will take it time to replicate across regions.
Rodrigo Almeida 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:04:30.123+00:00

West Europe here, only one of our 3 machines are affected, so far.
Anonymous

2021-10-13T09:07:45.543+00:00

Same issue in Central US.
Anonymous

2021-10-13T09:07:55.153+00:00

Same issue in Central US.
Graham Schofield 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:08:29.78+00:00

Same here with my AVD estate, only got one server running at the moment and I cannot scale up for my user rush but with AVD you can at least increase the session limit on my single remaining server so my users are less grumpy at the moment.
Anonymous

2021-10-13T09:17:08.94+00:00

Status page is woefully incorrect. North Central US also affected, shows green on status page.
John Nyabaro 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:18:30.913+00:00

Facing the same issue here in Kenya in the last 4 hours
Lorenz Hänggi 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:22:54.607+00:00

same issue here for VMSS VMs and SwitzerlandNorth

check out the status page
https://status.azure.com/en-us/status
George Norberg 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:35:49.767+00:00

Same problem here with VM in North EU.
Raymond de Jong 91 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:39:47.247+00:00

This issue might be the root cause that Azure DevOps is also having troubles.
Agents for Pipelines not starting

https://status.dev.azure.com/_event/266577720
Kiron Roy 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:44:35.46+00:00

Same issue in US West region
Kiron Roy 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:44:44.31+00:00

Same issue in US West region
Prasanna Venkateswaransachidanandam 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:49:01.34+00:00

Having the same issue in US east. Please help.
Purna Rao 26 Reputation points

2021-10-13T09:50:40.877+00:00

Observing same issue in west europe region
Purna Rao 26 Reputation points

2021-10-13T10:00:55.867+00:00

Facing same issue in Central US region as well. Any ETA for the fix?
Damien Tacheron 66 Reputation points

2021-10-13T10:01:23.99+00:00

Since this morning, i have about 50 employees of a service provider that are unable to do their work.
We are an important energy supplier and our customer support center is completely stopped
And Azure considers this as a warning level problem, not even critical while this outage occurs sinc 4 hours
Vincenzo Sferruzza 41 Reputation points

2021-10-13T10:22:59.373+00:00

I agree. It's a global issue that should be classified as critical.
No one can work.
It's a shame!
Martin Kidd 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T11:30:08.203+00:00

Looks like they are getting it resolved, I'm now able to start the VMs that were unable to start on schedule this morning. (Mine are all in the Canada East Datacentre)
JL 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T11:51:02.973+00:00

My VM has restarted successfully right now!
Bryon Brill 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T12:44:04.307+00:00

STOP the VM's and START the VM's having everyone pinging here isn't going to make it work any faster. clear the FAILED State by Stopping the VM. Then Starting it. I had to reboot a few of mine to get them to function properly.
Nora Ahmed 6 Reputation points

2022-06-02T23:05:26.477+00:00

×Close
comment previous version
There is a previous version saved. Would you like to load it or discard it
Amir Ahmed Salem Khalaf 341 Reputation points

2022-06-03T12:50:59.583+00:00

great
Sana'a Ma'rouf Al-Hussien (Al Sabaiba'a) 161 Reputation points

2022-06-03T13:47:02.09+00:00

Azure Support just acknowledged this issue on twitter
Javier Coreno 11 Reputation points

2022-06-13T22:35:33.367+00:00

I will try comment this post
Javier Coreno 11 Reputation points

2022-06-13T22:44:15.627+00:00

I will write this answer as a try.
Prakash Kunar 11 Reputation points

2022-10-14T08:06:20.39+00:00

the solution might be found soon
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Awan 5 Reputation points

2024-03-02T07:30:45.57+00:00

Its working for me almost month ago but now i am facing the exact same issue as well.
Nazar is real bro so Nazar ki dua also.
Hurajp 0 Reputation points

2024-05-01T17:03:43.3266667+00:00

hello Bro..
ZENOR BENEVOLENT SOCIAL ENTERPRISE JSC 10 Reputation points

2024-12-11T12:44:18.41+00:00

Better be ready.
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130 answers

Vincenzo Sferruzza 41 Reputation points

2021-10-13T10:29:01.907+00:00

... And the beautiful thing is that the VMs do not start but are allocated, so we must also pay them. So I advise everyone to stop VM interested.
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Marius Sandbu 56 Reputation points MVP

2021-10-13T08:29:56.457+00:00

It should also be noted that this outage also affects other services that are dependent on Compute Resources such as Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Kubernetes Service (running Windows) as well.

And yes this affects all Azure datacenters worldwide. Just have to wait until Microsoft fixes the artifact backend to point to the current version of the Azure VM Guest Agent which is running version 2.7.41491.1024
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Michael Cronqvist 26 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:08:30.197+00:00

Funny that Azure status site does not reflect this.
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David van der Velden 11 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:12:14.08+00:00

Pretty enraging :-)

Trabelsi Mohamed 6 Reputation points

2021-10-13T08:50:02.097+00:00

switzerland nord is impact but it's marked with goode health :! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Allan Juncher Pedersen 16 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:41:27.427+00:00

Exact same issue here - VM worked perfectly yesterday, but can't be started today
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Luca Lionetti 3,401 Reputation points

2021-10-13T07:39:40.223+00:00

Same error, west Europe
windows 2019
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Windows VMs won't start because the GuestAgent extension can't be found

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