Our server running on a linux VM in Azure's HK data center was returning weird errors. Turns out that our service itself was running just fine, but DNS resolution was failing on the server!
I've tried refetching the IP settings from DHCP by running 'dhclient', but from Azure's DHCP our server only gets a single DNS server! This seems ridiculous, since that would make that server a single point of failure, no matter how much effort we put into scaling and proofing our system. PLEASE FIX THIS!
I've manually added your competitor's 8.8.8.8 nameserver to work around the problem.
$ cat /etc/resolv.conf
; generated by /sbin/dhclient-script
search *******.h2.internal.cloudapp.net
nameserver 100.79.228.130
$ dig microsoft.com @100.79.228.130
; <<>> DiG 9.8.2rc1-RedHat-9.8.2-0.23.rc1.el6_5.1 <<>> microsoft.com @100.79.228.130
;; global options: +cmd
;; connection timed out; no servers could be reached
Lio.