Azure Website Publishing is not working because Azure Outage "ERROR_COULD_NOT_CONNECT_TO_REMOTESVC"

In recent months I have been using "Web Publish" from Visual Studio to publish my project to the Azure website . It worked great ... until this morning, right after a big azure downtime ...

Since this morning, I am getting the following error when I try to publish to my Azure site (Western Europe) and I have tried it a dozen times already:

Exception message: Could not connect to the remote computer ("XXXXX.scm.azurewebsites.net") using the specified process ("Web Management") because the server did not respond. Make sure the process ("Web Management Service") is running on the remote computer. More details: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=221672#ERROR_COULD_NOT_CONNECT_TO_REMOTESVC . (type DeploymentDetailedException)

I also tried to create a completely new site and published my project to this new site ... but I get the same error.

Since this is a shared server ... there is no way to check if the Web Management Service is running ! So ... can anyone help me here?