14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has sent an email to customers of its Cloud-based productivity offerings after the suite’s email service (no pun intended) experienced an outage a few hours long earlier this week. The message is designed to explain, just what caused the Office 365 Exchange Online downtime, at least in general terms since no specific details were provided. (via Mary-Jo Foley)
“Preliminary investigation indicates that a networking interruption in one of our North America data centers caused Office 365 Exchange Online to be inaccessible by some customers.
“This incident lasted from approximately 11:30 AM PDT to 2:40 PM PDT, during which time customers were not able to access the Outlook Web App or send and receive email through Exchange Online.
“The Service Health Dashboard was updated regularly during the event to notify customers of the problem, though there was a brief period of intermittent access issues to that dashboard,” the email reads.
Office 365, just as a range of additional services from the Redmond company is governed by what the software giant refers to as a service level agreement (SLA).
Office 365’s SLA expressly notes that in addition to Microsoft’s commitment to deliver reliability, availability, and performance, 99.9% uptime is also guaranteed. The SLA exists to ensure that customers will get compensated in case that uptime actually falls under 99.9%.
“We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business. As a gesture of our commitment to ensuring the highest quality service experience Microsoft is proactively providing your organization a credit equal to 25% of your monthly invoice. The credit will appear on a future invoice, and you do not need to contact Microsoft to receive this credit. Please note, processing of the credit may take as long as 90 days,” the company added in the email.
If you ask Microsoft representatives about downtime for their Cloud services they’ll shrug your question off and say that’s impossible. Trust me, it happened to me on more than one occasion.
I do believe them when they say that the infrastructure powering their Cloud is set in such a manner that outages are almost impossible, just as I believe that nothing is impossible.
The software giant ensures that it will take the necessary measures to prevent similar outages in the future:
“The data center’s networking facilities have been remediated and we are investigating the root cause. We continue to monitor the overall network very closely to maintain high levels of service to customers.”