Microsoft's Hotmail, SkyDrive and other cloud services crashed on the night of Sept. 8. Services now appear restored.
Microsoft's
cloud underwent a significant outage on the night of Sept. 8.
"If you've
been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive or our other Live properties for the last
couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services," Chris
Jones, senior vice president for Windows Live, wrote in a posting on
The Windows Blog. "We're aware of these issues
and actively working to resolve them."
By 11:49 PT,
he provided an update to his posting: "We have completed propagating our DNS [Domain
Name System] configuration changes around the world, and have restored service
for most customers."
As of press
time, Microsoft has not responded to
eWEEK's request for an update. The outage seems to have affected customers
worldwide.
This is the
second significant outage for Microsoft's cloud services in the past few weeks.
In August, Office 365 and Microsoft CRM users were hit with downtime that a
company spokesperson attributed to a "networking issue" at "one of our North
American data centers." The Office 365 suite bundles online versions of
Microsoft's productivity software onto a common platform.
In that
earlier case, service also ended up fully restored. However, customers
wrestling with a lack of email and CRM voiced their displeasure on Twitter and
the Web at large. "Office in the Cloud just evaporated," read one post on
an Office 365 forum. "Need some new weather
patterns."
The occasional
cloud downtime isn't limited to Microsoft. In April, a well-publicized outage
at Amazon Web Services led to service disruptions across the Internet,
affecting popular Websites such as Reddit, Quora and Hootsuite. Google lost
some user email data in February, after which it launched an aggressive effort
at restoration.
This industry-wide
drift toward online services prodded Microsoft into embracing an "all-in" cloud
strategy, which the company hopes will allow it to diversify its revenue stream
beyond desktop software. In theory, the cloud-based subscription model will
ultimately yield more revenue than a single software license, provided the
customers in question keep paying over a sustained period of time.
Microsoft is
also pushing hybridized solutions that mix cloud services with more traditional
on-premises features. On Sept. 8, Microsoft released Microsoft Dynamics AX
2012, its enterprise resource planning application with integrated cloud
offerings-in particular, the Rapid Start, Payment and Commerce services
available via Windows Azure.
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