FYI: Business
BY Staff and Wire reports
Saturday, February 23, 2013
2/23/13 at 2:57 AM
State drilling rig count plunges by nine to 185
The number of drilling rigs actively exploring for oil or natural gas in Oklahoma fell by nine this week to 185, Baker Hughes Inc. reported Friday.
The tally is down 13 from a year ago, when it was 198.
Nationwide, the net number of active drilling units fell by one this week to 1,761, according to Houston-based Baker Hughes' website.
A year ago, the U.S. rig count was 1,981.
Of the rigs operating across the country this week, 1,329, or 75 percent of the total, were drilling for oil, while 428 were exploring for gas. Four rigs were listed as miscellaneous.
Friday on the New York Mercantile Exchange, benchmark crude oil for April delivery rose 29 cents to finish the week at $93.13 a barrel.
Natural gas rose 4.5 cents to finish at $3.29 per 1,000 cubic feet.
Microsoft lapse causes Azure service outage
Microsoft unwittingly let an online security certificate expire Friday, triggering a worldwide outage in an online service that stores data for a wide range of business customers.
The sloppy housekeeping represents an embarrassing lapse for Microsoft Corp. as the software maker tries to bring in more revenue from the storage service, which is called Azure.
The expired certificate is needed to properly run online services such as Azure which use an "https" protocol to block unauthorized users from accessing information.
Microsoft's failure to renew the security certificate apparently caused the Azure service to go down shortly before 3 p.m. CST. The breakdown prevented Azure customers from accessing files kept in Microsoft's data centers.
The service still hadn't been fully restored more than four hours later, according to a post on Microsoft's website.
"We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers," Microsoft said.
Azure's failure illuminates the pitfalls of storing important information in remote data centers, called "cloud computing."
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