Outage Strikes Microsoft's Office 365, CRM Online and SkyDrive -- Redmondmag.com

Outage Strikes Microsoft's Office 365, CRM Online and SkyDrive

By Jeffrey Schwartz
08/17/2011

Several Microsoft cloud services are experiencing major outages today including Office 365, CRM Online and SkyDrive.

It marks the first major outage for Office 365 since its launch in June. The service it replaces, Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) has experienced several high profile outages this year.

CRM Online today experienced slow performance to the point where some users both in North America and abroad were unable to use it, reported ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley.

Steven Gerri, general manager of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, said the outages are the result of a networking issue at one of the company's North American data centers.

"At approximately 11:30 a.m. PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers," Gerri said in a prepared 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."

It is not known how many Office 365 customers are affected but the majority of Microsoft's hosted Exchange customers are still on BPOS. Microsoft is not transitioning BPOS customers to Office 365 until September. It is not clear whether today's outage will further delay those migrations.

Update: Microsoft said as of late Wednesday afternoon that all systems are back up. The company is still investigating the root cause of the network failure.

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.

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