Microsoft’s US Azure service is now using IPv4 addresses from outside the US. This means that US based VMs can appear to be located in foreign countries. Sometimes this can cause issues for users who utilise geo-location services. Microsoft explains in its post that it is working closely with several geo-location database services to alleviate these issues.
Microsoft Azure’s problems are another example of the growing issues that service providers and users are beginning to experience during the final phase of IPv4 address exhaustion. The only long term solution is IPv6. Unfortunately, Azure is one Microsoft service which is still waiting to be IPv6 enabled.