A journey through Microsoft’s support channels today. I think I’m yet to have a positive experience with a Microsoft support representative, mainly because it seems like none of them have been told what the products do. Today’s communication is a perfect example of this.

We make use of Azure CDN to cache static assets close to our users. Arguably, that’s the main purpose of a CDN. Recently, it stopped working and started displaying an error message with a few identifiers on it (which look like they should be useful for diagnostic purposes), so I raised a case with support.

After telling me that it was all fine and there were no problems (it would appear that this issue isn’t affecting all CDN servers, but happens to affect one near me at least), I sent them a HAR Trace which was nice and simple to do. They then came back to me (after doing some digging) and said that it was a problem retrieving the content from the source, and purging the cache should fix it.

That didn’t work, so the next step was to disable caching entirely (by configuring a rule in the CDN portal). That stopped the error message from appearing and rendered the content. I informed them of this and asked them what the next steps were. The response made me laugh (and not in a good way):

It is good to know that Issue is resolved now. For the next action plan, You can keep the configuration as it is configured now. Please let me know if you have any further queries.

Yes, the error message no longer appears, but I may as well not be using the CDN anymore because it’s not caching anything! This went backwards and forwards for a couple of weeks before we gave up using the CDN altogether. It’s just not worth the hassle.