Azure SLES 12 repository problems

Howdy,

We are using Suse SLES 12 images on Azure in our deployments, out of the East US region. The images are of Suse SLES 12, no service pack, created from official Suse images.
In the last few weeks we keep running into problems with packages updates or checking.
We’d run zypper to search or check the status of a package, zypper would fail to access some repository (usually ‘Valid metadata not found at specified URL’).
Annoyingly, it also delete all repositories from /etc/zypp/repos.d after such failures. Forcing us to re-register the vm (using /usr/sbin/registercloudguest).
It happened again yesterday, and continues today.
Any idea to the cause? how to mitigate it?

Thanks,

We have had some issues with the update servers in US-East for an as of yet unexplained reason. The update servers needed to be replaced three weeks ago and over the weekend the systems became unresponsive due to overload. Both issues are under investigation.

At this point the update infrastructure operates as expected. Unfortunately there is no ETA for a final resolution as we do not yet fully understand why we are seeing this behavior in the US-East region of Azure.

We apologize for the inconvenience.