Microsoft's Hotmail, Office 365, and Live services are gradually being restored after an embarrassing major outage this afternoon that impacted on as many as 364 million users. The outage affected Microsoft Live and cloud services and began around 1pm AEST. "We are investigating service interruption. Will update as soon as more details are available or within hour," the official Office 365 Twitter feed (@Office365) said. The official Windows Inside Live blog confirmed other services also had failed. "If you've been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive, or our other Live properties in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services," the blog said. "We're aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience." Services appear slowly to be coming back online late this afternoon. "We believe we have restored service for all customers at this time," the blog said around 2.45 pm AEST. But reports of services being unavailable continued for more than an hour later.
Microsoft said it would still take time for services to come back online due to the time required for DNS configuration changes. The outage has impacted business and educational institutions around Australia linked to Microsoft's new Office 365 cloud-based email services. Australian broadcaster SBS was among those impacted. "SBS, which recently moved to Microsoft, was amongst many affected clients which saw a total outtage in email services, which hit users from the Asia-Pacific to Europe," SBS reported on its website. An online site monitoring tool showed Microsoft's Hotmail service as heavily impacted about 4.50pm AEST. Windows Live Hotmail is reported to have nearly 364 million users worldwide. The failure comes one day after a brief, 30-minute outage of Google cloud apps. Both are likely to highlight the risk organisations have, should they become dependent on cloud services.
Source: The Australian
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