Microsoft Has an Office 365 Outage
Portions of Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud computing suite were down for several hours in the U.S, including some unrelated services, on Wednesday, the company confirmed.
However, the outage didn’t last very long and the services are now restored, according to Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT).
“We apologize for the inconvenience that the #Office365 outage has caused today. We are working on resolving the issue,” a tweet from @MSCloudUS said Wednesday early on in the outage.
One of the first reports of the failure came from tech enthusiast blog Neowin.net, which published a statement from Microsoft.
“At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers. We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue,” Steven Gerri, general manager of Global Foundation Services, said in a statement, which was also sent to InternetNews.com.
Later tweets said the service outage had been resolved.
“Office365: #Office365 email service restored at 2:30PM PDT. Network issues resolved in North American Data Center. APAC/Europe not impacted,” said a tweet posted to the Office 365 Community Website.
According to other information gleaned from the Web, the majority of the impact was on users of Exchange email, which is one of the key components of the Office 365 suite.
However, according to a post to Mary Jo Foley’s All About Microsoft blog, an outage also affected users of Microsoft’s SkyDrive personal storage in the cloud service. Additionally, Foley said that she had also received reports from some users who experienced an outage of Microsoft’s separate CRM Online service.
Microsoft officially launched Office 365 — which includes cloud-hosted online versions of Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010, and Lync 2010, as well as Web-based Microsoft Office Web Apps and the option of licensing Office 2010 Professional on a subscription basis — in late June.
A Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com in an email that the company had no further information on the outage.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
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