VMs were shutdown Reason Code: 0x80000000

Three of our VMs were shutdown last night at 8:37PM EST.  I was able to manually restart the VMs, but there were significant issues with network connectivity for a 20 min period afterwards.  Our other 7 VM's were unaffected.

System event logs record the shutdown events as 'Planned (other)' and being initiated by vmicsvc.exe without any further comment in the event.

The process C:\Windows\system32\vmicsvc.exe (EZAZWEB30) has initiated the shutdown of computer EZAZWEB30 on behalf of user NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM for the following reason: Other (Planned)

Reason Code: 0x80000000

Shutdown Type: shutdown

Comment:

I understand the need to recycle services in Azure, sometimes without warning, but I'd like to find out more information about why a complete shutdown occurred (without notification) and how we can be informed about the cause in the future. 

This is very unfortunate and I apologize for the difficulties! This is a known bug that we have a fix rolling out (slowly) right now. In the meantime, we have two options to resolve your problem:

1) Send the details of your subscriptionID and virtual machine in this state to  iaasforum[at]microsoft.com and reference this thread. We can fix this for you.

2) A faster way is to simply resize your VM. You could change its size from Small to Medium (or something similar), leave it that way for some time and resize it back. This should resolve the problem by forcibly moving you.

This is clearly an unacceptable problem and one we are racing to fix!! We apologize for the inconvenience.