Microsoft’s Cloud Computing Services Affected By Outage
September 9, 2011
At a time when competition between Microsoft and Google are at an all time high for cloud based office products, Redmond sees another outage for their Office 365 cloud service. Unfortunately for Microsoft, this outage was not just limited to Office 365, but also included other Microsoft properties including SkyDrive and Hotmail…
According to the reports, the outage was caused by a DNS issue. The problem started at about 4AM GMT and remained in effect for nearly 3.5 hours. Depending upon what part of the world you live in, you may or may not have been greatly impacted. Within Europe, use of these Microsoft services would have been lower at this time as most people would have been sleeping, but the greatest impact would have been on North American and Asia Pacific users who were impacted at the end of their day and middle of their day respectively.
It did take several hours to resolve the problem and Microsoft tried to reach out to their customers, thanking them for their patience as they worked to resolve the DNS issues. However, this is the second major outage for Office 365 since its official launch this June as the replacement for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Service or BPOS and this time around, other services were impacted as well.