It might have taken close to 9 hours, but at the very least, Microsoft has managed to fix their Exchange Online service after some downtime. The Exchange Online outage resulted in affected users being unable to gain access to their email earlier today, which naturally led to an expression of their frustration via other online channels concerning the inability to get their work done. Microsoft remained mum on the number of customers who were affected by this outage, but based on the sheer volume of complaints that were spotted over in discussion forums and social media channels, chances are it would have affected a large swathe of them.
In a nutshell, it proved to be a double whammy of disasters, since the outage happened during work hours in the U.S., making this quite an embarrassing moment for Microsoft who is currently embroiled in a high stakes game against the likes of Google where the cloud communication and collaboration software markets are concerned.
Some have even taken things one step further by slapping some humor on the situation, calling it Office 364 since a single day’s worth of productivity has been eliminated from the picture no thanks to this particular outage. Microsoft has attributed this outage to “a portion of the networking infrastructure” having “entered into a degraded state.” There ya go – it was a hardware issue.