Those thinking that cloud computing has yet to reach acceptable levels of stability have received more ammunition following Microsoft’s latest online malfunctions...
Microsoft has apologised again for last week’s multiple outages of its Business Productivity Online.
Standard (BPOS) collaboration service, which shut users out of hosted Exchange email systems.
At first passing the interruption off as mere “service degradation”, Microsoft gained users’ ire after customers found themselves unable to read, write or even access email services.
A full two days later, Dave Thompson, corporate vice president for Microsoft’s online services, apologised and said that the outages were caused by “malformed email”.
“I’d like to apologize to you, our customers and partners, for the obvious inconveniences these issues caused. We know that email is a critical part of your business communication, and my team and I fully recognize our responsibility as your partner and service provider. We will provide a full post mortem, and will also provide additional updates on how our service level agreement (SLA) was impacted. We will be proactively issuing a service credit to our impacted customers.”
The service then experienced two more interruptions, resulting in a backlog of approximately 1.5 million emails, with some customers also complaining that they were unable to access Outlook web Access for around three hours.
