I am facing this problem when I try to publish my web application on Windows Azure via Visual Studio 2010. I am trying by right click on project and select publish and importing
I faced the same problem when trying to deploy to Azure from VS2013 update 5. It happens intermittently. Sometimes publishing works, sometimes it doesn't. In my case it turned out to be network related. We use a load balancing router with two WANs connected to it. If the external IP address changes during the deployment process, because the router switched WANs, it fails. Hope that will help someone.