More Outages for Office 365
More Outages for Office 365 by UCStrategies Staff
For the second time in November 2012, North American users of Microsoft Office 365 have been experiencing email problems. Microsoft Office 365 is the company’s cloud-hosted bundle of Lync Online, Exchange Online and SharePoint Online. It is in direct competition with Google Apps/Docs.
“On Tuesday, November 13, some customers served from our North America data centers are experiencing intermittent access to e-mail services. Customers are being updated regularly via our normal communication channels. We sincerely apologize to our customers for any inconvenience,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.
Shortly after the announcement Microsoft posted a tweet announcing that service restoration was underway. Office 365 users were also troubled by downtime on November 8, 2012. Initially, the cause of the November 13 outages was not clear. Neither was it apparent what Microsoft was doing to prevent more problems with the email services.
By 6 pm ET on November 13, the company tweeted that the email issues had been resolved. There was still no word at the time about why the downtime had occurred or what Microsoft was doing to prevent it from happening again.
It wasn’t until the following day that Microsoft posted a more detailed explanation of the two outages on its blog. According to the post, the November 8 problems were caused by an antivirus issue. Issues on November 12 were due to a combination of load issues, “network element,” and maintenance. Microsoft officials said that they are striving to prevent a reoccurrence of these issues.
At the end of the blog post, several people have left comments that they felt Microsoft's health dashboard was inadequate for monitoring service status during outages.
The latest Office 365 email issues coincided with the Microsoft and Hewlett Packard announcement of Office 365’s approval for government platform. Under a five-year agreement, the combined companies are about to moving 600,000 Veterans Affairs users to Office 365. The contract, announced back in July 2012, has a value of $36 million.
The VA will deploy Office 365 for government. The infrastructure features a community cloud for shared calendars, email, web and video conferencing as well as instant messaging. It also includes the company’s collaboration and productivity applications Exchange, Lync, Office and SharePoint.
Microsoft is preparing a series of new Office 365 plans and packages for release in November 2012 in tandem with its release of Office 2013. (CU) Link