In test after test, including pre-production staging, it did so and proved reliable, wrote Zander. That may have lead to overconfidence and haste in attempting to deploy the update and realize the performance gains. Whatever the cause, Azure administrators have implemented automated practices that won't allow a human decision to overrule its "flighting" best practice -- using separate and limited implementations for putting new code into production. In perhaps the clearest outcome of the incident, Zander wrote: "Microsoft Azure had clear operating guidelines, but there was a gap in the deployment tooling that relied on human decisions ... With the tooling updates, the policy is now enforced by the deployment platform itself." Zander acknowledged that cloud operations must become more reliable and said Microsoft will continue to work on that goal. "We sincerely apologize and recognize the significant impact this service interruption may have had on your applications and services," he wrote.