This has just caused our production app service to go off line this morning. Very frustrating as deployment to a test environment worked fine it was only when we deployed to release the web.config comment issue showed up.

Thanks for the people that have posted on here about this - I was very lost as to what the issue was. So a quick edit of comments in the web.config got us back online.

Microsoft - you need to respond and fix this - very subtle issue and only with a bit a google luck did we get a work around.

This has just caused our production app service to go off line this morning. Very frustrating as deployment to a test environment worked fine it was only when we deployed to release the web.config comment issue showed up.

Thanks for the people that have posted on here about this - I was very lost as to what the issue was. So a quick edit of comments in the web.config got us back online.

Microsoft - you need to respond and fix this - very subtle issue and only with a bit a google luck did we get a work around.

Thank you for your feedback! We have fixed this issue.

The Hotfix is in progress and will be updating the thread once it is deployed in all the regions.

Having the same issue as well. The build/release process has worked fine for months until today. I was able to resolve this by making all my comments inline. So instead of a comment begin tag, several lines of config, then a comment end tag, I have the comment begin and end tags on each line. It is a pain, but it works. I am sure Microsoft will have the parser fixed soon.