Microsoft is having a bit of a torrid time when it comes to reliability of its online services this year, it seems. It was only on February 1 this year when the last outage occurred, taking down Outlook.com, SkyDrive and Office 365 for a fair while.
Now it’s Hotmail, Outlook.com along with SkyDrive and Calendar that have experienced worldwide outage. A couple of notifications that showed up on Microsoft’s service status page read:
“We’re having a problem accessing email. You might not be able to see all your email messages. We’re working to restore service right now. Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped. We’ll provide an update by Mar 13 11:12 AM. We apologize for the lengthy interruption in service.”
All four services were restored around 10 AM EST, and are currently back up and running.
It is worth noting that Microsoft’s online services have always boasted exceptional uptimes and stability. Perhaps it is the transition to Outlook.com or the addition of a large number of new users to the service that is affecting the platform.
Chances are that the large amounts of server and software updates that go on behind the scenes also play their part. Regardless, here’s hoping this does not become a regular occurrence, and Redmond takes reliability much more serious from now on — particularly when it can affect millions of users.
