Microsoft's Office 365 Email Service Knocked Offline
Microsoft suffered an outage with its Office 365 online service Wednesday afternoon, according to the company's Twitter feed and messages from customers.
Microsoft suffered an outage with its Office 365 online service Wednesday afternoon, according to the company's Twitter feed and messages from customers.
The outage appears to have taken place from roughly 2 PM ET until 4 PM E T, according to Microsoft's Office 36 Twitter feed. "Services restoration beginning and being verified. Understand that Service Health Dashboard was intermittent. Pls try again," the company wrote at about 3 PM PT.
Outages were reported in Chicago, Denver, and New York City, among other locations. Users were unable to access their email, and IT administrators were unable to manage accounts, according to affected users.
"At approximately 11:30 AM PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of North American data centers," said Steven Gerri, general manager of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, in a statement. "We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue."
Microsoft launched , and the company touted it as a means for businesses and IT administrators to save costs, although businesses also had concerns about how Office 365 would interact with line-of-business apps.
Other benefits to shifting to cloud services, including the promise of constant uptime, has not proven true. A good example of this has been Intuit, whose QuickBooks service went down , , and . Amazon, for its part, suffered , knocking customers such as Netflix and Foursquare offline.
"Is anyone else's email down," user "jgc" posted at 2:25 PM. "My Outlook can not connect to the server and when I log on to the web portal, I can log on. But when I click on Outlook, it displays 'HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.'"
Even the service page to report a bug appeared to be down as well, users reported.
"This is completely UNACCEPTABLE! I am just finishing up the conversion for my company! This is a terrible way to start," 'Acousticlen" wrote. "I now have an entire company looking at me wondering if we really are doing the right thing. I can't even submit a real TT because that portal seems to be down as well. That a Microsoft rep has not even jumped on this or any other thread that I have found so far tells me and the rest of my company just how much they really care about the companies they are hosting, which does not seem to be very much!"
That should force Microsoft to credit users, according to another user, "kanderson," who pointed to Microsoft's service-level agreement. According to that document, Microsoft guarantees a 99.9 percent level of uptime. If Microsoft fails to reach 99.9 percent uptime, users are eligible for 25 percent service credit; a less than 99 percent uptime will make users available for a 50 percent credit.
Microsoft's Hotmail Webmail service appeared unaffected.