Several Outlook users were affected by Exchange Online server outage happened a few months ago that rendered their Outlook accounts incapable of accessing emails for duration of nine hours. Microsoft took its time to repair the fault causing substantial number of users to get frustrated, and prompting many to let off their steam online in social media sites and discussion forums. Although the company has not released a true count of the number of people, who were affected, the volume of complaints registered indicates this is one of the biggest outage of all times. Many annoyed users contacted the Microsoft help forum without any positive results since the fault was from the Microsoft’s side.
Apart from the sheer number of people who were affected by the outage, Microsoft received a lot of flak for the delay in rectifying the issue and the timing of the disruption during the peak office hours in US. Not only did Microsoft lose face because of this fiasco, this event does not bode well in its fight with Google over the cloud communication and collaboration software market.
Exchange Online, as you may know, is a component of Office 365 service and has been sold as a standalone service for long. It has been Microsoft’s popular cloud communication and collaboration suite applications for businesses, schools, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.
Although Microsoft was reluctant to give updates about the disruption while the repair was going on, Microsoft representative updated the discussion thread on the Office 365 support forum, where it noted that the service has been restored after about nine hours.
David Zhang, Microsoft support official wrote in the support forum, “Investigation determined that a portion of the networking infrastructure entered into a degraded state. Engineers made configuration changes on the affected capacity to remediate end-user impact.”
As expected, Outlook users were not impressed with all this and complained online about its slow pace in acknowledging the outage and lack of communication with the big user base when fixing the issue. Any interested user can log into Twitter and check the complaints that were addressed to Microsoft Office 365 Twitter account during that afternoon.
The frustration of employees and employers alike is understandable considering that enterprises that shut down their local server and networks and switched to vendor-hosted Office 635 cloud service in the last few months were brought to a complete standstill. If you want to know more about Office 365 and the risks involved, feel free to check out the Microsoft help forum.
Apart from the sheer number of people who were affected by the outage, Microsoft received a lot of flak for the delay in rectifying the issue and the timing of the disruption during the peak office hours in US. Not only did Microsoft lose face because of this fiasco, this event does not bode well in its fight with Google over the cloud communication and collaboration software market.
Exchange Online, as you may know, is a component of Office 365 service and has been sold as a standalone service for long. It has been Microsoft’s popular cloud communication and collaboration suite applications for businesses, schools, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.
Although Microsoft was reluctant to give updates about the disruption while the repair was going on, Microsoft representative updated the discussion thread on the Office 365 support forum, where it noted that the service has been restored after about nine hours.
David Zhang, Microsoft support official wrote in the support forum, “Investigation determined that a portion of the networking infrastructure entered into a degraded state. Engineers made configuration changes on the affected capacity to remediate end-user impact.”
As expected, Outlook users were not impressed with all this and complained online about its slow pace in acknowledging the outage and lack of communication with the big user base when fixing the issue. Any interested user can log into Twitter and check the complaints that were addressed to Microsoft Office 365 Twitter account during that afternoon.
The frustration of employees and employers alike is understandable considering that enterprises that shut down their local server and networks and switched to vendor-hosted Office 635 cloud service in the last few months were brought to a complete standstill. If you want to know more about Office 365 and the risks involved, feel free to check out the Microsoft help forum.
