In Microsofts cloud system was down around the world. Users in India and elsewhere were unable to access their Hotmail and Skydrive accounts for almost four hours. Office 365 was also inaccessible.
The official Microsoft blogs and Twitter accounts were busy putting out the small public relations flare ups, but these things happen and there was little spokespersons could do but tell users to sit tight. Servers can go down. Databases can be wiped. Power lines can be cut.
On its Office 365 Twitter feed, the firm said, Preliminary root cause suggests a DNS issue. Few hours later on a company blog, Microsoft said it had fixed the problem, but the repairs took some time to propagate through the DNS network.
"We are working on propagating the DNS configuration changes and so it will take some time to restore service to everyone. Again we appreciate your patience," the firm said.
Earlier this year, Microsoft had launched Office 365, as a competitor to Google Apps, which went live earlier this year, but now the system has suffered a second major technical failure in less than a month. Last time when Office 365 had failed for few hours, Microsoft had offered 25 percent discount to its users. This time there has not been any talk of discount yet.
Every online service suffers a downtime at some point of time. But if such incidents start occurring frequently then some organisations may start rethinking about any migration to online cloud services, whereby software is delivered from vast data centres, over the Internet.
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