James Delahunty
9 Sep 2011 20:25
Microsoft services hit by outage late Thursday, early Friday.
The outage was caused by DNS issues, according to Microsoft posts while the problem was being fixed. It lasted for around two and half hours late on Thursday night (early Friday morning in Europe.) Affected services included Microsoft's Hotmail e-mail service, Skydrive cloud storage and Office 365.
"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers. Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues," a Microsoft blog read on Thursday night.
Cloud services allow corporate and home users to move their files and computing needs to powerful remote servers. In the case of Office 365, corporations can pay monthly subscription fees for its employees, only paying for services that those particular employees will use.
The advantages are potentially reduced costs, universal access to documents and other materials from anyway there is Internet access, piece of mind that important work is kept safe in the cloud where local system failures cannot destroy it and strong security that these services generally utilize.
However, with this outage of Office 365 and other widely reported cloud-outages (e.g. Amazon EC2), confidence that such services can stay alive 24/7 can be affected. For corporate users in particular, outages to services they pay a fee for could be costly.