Well, there was another outage for Office 365 last night, so I think today I’m going to try and be a little more timely with this by providing several links to the coverage:
- Let’s start with the word from Microsoft’s Windows Live Team Blog. Basically, Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Live services suffered an outage last night, and while the blog post doesn’t mention it, it looks like it impacted Office 365 users as well (judging by news reports and the flurry of posts that subscribers made to the Office 365 Community forums): http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/09/08/current-hotmail-and-skydrive-issues.aspx
- The Office 365 Twitter account seemed to be doing a good job of providing status updates on the outage and interacting with customers, check it out for a timeline on the event and for a pretty good ongoing source for quick status updates on the service: http://twitter.com/#!/office365/669_quotunable_to__cannot_remove_domainquot_error_in_office_365.html
- Several news outlets picked up on the outage as well, such as the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455
- And The Register: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/09/microsoft_cloud_outage/
- And The Telegraph (I’m not sure if the heavy UK coverage is because they’re several hours ahead of the US, or if its a bigger deal over the pond): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/8752156/Millions-of-Hotmail-users-cut-off-by-Microsoft-cloud-failure.html
- Information Age has a very good article connecting some dots between the Live/Office 365 outage and power outage issues that were occurring up and down the West Coast of the US last night: http://www.information-age.com/channels/the-cloud-and-virtualization/news/1653788/global-office-365-outage-coincides-with-us-power-cut.thtml
- One of ZDNet’s bloggers makes some good points about this being a bit of an ongoing problem for Office 365, and the need for Microsoft to build up some goodwill in the near future if they want to instill confidence in the solution: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/microsofts-office-365-outages-pile-up-growing-pains-or-uptime-issues/57680
- Nice quick summary of various tweets about the outage from the blog LiveSide.net, as well as good points about this happening to other cloud service providers during the same window as well: http://www.liveside.net/2011/09/08/hotmail-msn-office-365-live-com-sites-down/
- Here’s another rundown of the issue from an Australian blog, SBSFAQ.com: http://www.sbsfaq.com/?p=3078
- Finally, a great read from the LooksCloudy.com blog that really makes some good points and opines that Microsoft needs to think about doing a better job of setting expectations about such a new service: http://www.lookscloudy.com/2011/09/over-promise-and-under-deliver-thoughts-on-microsofts-cloud-outage-last-night
My final thoughts on the matter: all in all I’m more concerned about the mechanisms (or lack thereof) Microsoft has set up for customers to stay up to speed on the status of their services than the stability of a platform that is still very young, especially one so completely dependent on so many disconnected systems (platforms in multiple data centers across the world, DNS, internet connectivity, power connectivity, etc). I’m not letting them off the hook for the issues, especially if this is a trend rather than growing pains. But in general, I think they need to focus as much as having a single simple, coherent, effective, and LOUD way for customers to know about the status of their service as on its stability. I know there are status pages, as well as things like the Twitter account (which was a good tool, and probably the source I’m going to check first for stuff like this from now on), but the perspective I’ve heard from customers and partners is that the information provided right now is either too hard to find and/or understand, or is not current. This isn’t exactly an easy problem to solve (since email would be the natural mechanism and at the same time one that can easily impacted by an outage), but Microsoft need to tackle it now rather than later.
UPDATE: As I come across additional links on the outage, I’ll try to post them here. Probably won’t provide as much commentary on them, but at the same time I’m looking to provide links that do give something beyond the ones I’ve already listed…
- WinRumors.com also mentions the outage, and there’s several comments on the post as well, so it’s getting attention: http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-recovering-from-hour-long-hotmail-skydrive-and-office-365-outage/
John
