Microsoft recovering from hour long Hotmail, SkyDrive and Office 365 outage

By Tom Warren, on 9th Sep 11 5:30 am with 41 Comments

Microsoft has been experiencing outages with a variety of its online services late on Thursday evening.

The software giant confirmed problems accessing its sites and promised that the company was working to fix the problems. “We’re aware of an outage impacting some of our properties. We are actively working to resolve this issue & seeing some returning now,” said a Microsoft spokesperson.

Reports suggest that Hotmail, SkyDrive, Office 365, MSN and a number of other properties hosted at live.com have been inaccessible for around an hour. Microsoft’s Office 365 team admitted that “intermittent client connectivity causing some users to have trouble with email connection.” LiveSide speculates that the outage could be related to a “massive” power outage in the American southwest or an internet routing issue with the specific web properties themselves.

Microsoft recently discounted Office 365 users bills by 25% after a three hour service outage on August 17. Microsoft launched Office 365 worldwide on June 28. Office 365 provides Office 2010, Exchange, SharePoint and Lync all Online in a cloud-based service. The service is a full browser-based solution that incorporates webmail, collaboration and document management.

  • http://www.facebook.com/andreirlopes Andrei R. Lopes

    Nothing is perfect at all time. We forgive you, Microsoft.

    • Anonymous

      These outages are “good” for MS, thus they learn more and more and root out the weaknesses from the system.

    • Seth_p

      True, they learned quite a bit when Bing was introduced.

    • Test1ngi23

      If that was Gmail instead of Hotmail, I have no doubt that you guys would be blasting Google as the worst tech company in the world. The hypocrisy of the commenters here is amazing!

    • Guest

      Service interruptions are a fact of life, for Google as well as MS. Feel free to stfu now.

    • Seth_p

      Not really, you’re just hypothesizing nonsense. Just as Guest said, service interruptions are a fact of life. Shit happens to either side of the coin.

    • Test1ngi23

      If that was Gmail instead of Hotmail, I have no doubt that you guys would be blasting Google as the worst tech company in the world. The hypocrisy of the commenters here is amazing!

  • Akhtar
    • http://www.facebook.com/andreirlopes Andrei R. Lopes

      Here in Brazil too. Here’s 2:00am now. Let’s see it in the morning.

  • http://twitter.com/IGXNick Nick

    Hour long? Nope, phone hasn’t gotten mail in 3 hours.. and still can’t access from my computer

  • Storm

    Websites are inaccessible too

  • http://www.twitter.com/wixostrix WixosTrix

    I haven’t had any issues access Hotmail but when I go to the Windows Live landing page it does say it’s having trouble getting my feeds.  Skydrive seems to be working fine too.  I’m in the US.

  • Red21

    Down in Canada

    • Guest

      Not in the west.

  • Akhtar

    back online in UK now

  • Akhtar

    back online in UK now

  • Anonymous

    iCloud will be up 24/7/365, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% up time guaranteed.

    • Anonymous

      LOOOOOOL . iCloud powered by MS Windows Azure .

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1618268197 Timothy Neinheart

      Again, ArrowSmith trolls.

      ArrowSmith, ultimate stupidity, will be trolling  24/7/365, 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999% up time guaranteed

    • Anonymous

      Key words “will be” so obviously you talk about something you have experience with… not

    • Anonymous

      you just defined the characteristic of  “isheeps” , always on , always trolling, what a bunch of losers.

    • Anonymous

      you just defined the characteristic of  “isheeps” , always on , always trolling, what a bunch of losers.

    • Anonymous

      Please provide a source for that info… Nobody is going to guarantee less than 1 second of downtime a year.

    • Guest

      Sure it will, just like mobileme did. BTW dumbass, did you know it’s currently running on AWS and Azure?

    • Seth_p

      Do you know how stupid and poorly articulated your posts come off to commentators? By all means, keep spreading your ignorance if that’s how you want to represent a side you favor.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/6G3ZZJCHOLYP3S5CRCIHQ7WDSE MVIM

    An hour? I’m on the east coast in the US. We’ve been down since around 10 PM, and it’s 2:30 AM now. Hotmail on the web (PC site) is up, and WLM and social updates through Live.com are up. SkyDrive and mobile EAS, among other things, are still down as we approach 4.5 hours.

  • Hpendragon

    Been down in Florida for a couple hours now, and ha trouble earlier today too on messenger

  • sscoutman

    It is still down in Sweden local time 8:30am friday 9th

    • sscoutman

      Online at 8:40am, when testing

  • Jennylh

    Still down in Yorkshire, England

  • Anonymous

    Everything seems fine for me. But seriously, MS needs to step up their game. If I’m not mistaken there was another Office 365 outage not too long back.

    But then when you see the kind of people that they have (look at what the team did with Windows 8′s boot time) I’m sure they’ll come through! 

    • Anonymous

      Forget the Windows Live services outage I want to have electricty back out here

    • GP007

      If the outage is tied to the power outage in the Southwest of the US then there is little MS can do other than run a huge datacenter on equally huge gas eating generators, which will only jack up costs in the end.   Lets face it, these services need lots of servers and lots of power.

    • Anonymous

      Maybe, but they can’t just wait for the power to come back online and do nothing in the mean time when people have paid to use these services.

  • Anonymous

    I don’t blame them, its because of outage

  • GP007

    It’s a plot by google, they’re probably DDoS’ing live.com with their datacenters.  :P

  • Anonymous

    It’s OK. Microsoft only guarantees 99.9% (three nines) uptime for Office 365.

    http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/plans/small-business/uptime.aspx#fbid=zCP7uOwXe8x

    With 8760 hours in a year, they’re allowed 8.76 hours of downtime a year. They aren’t a 4, 5 or 6 nines service.

  • Guest

    HAHAHAHAHAHA! What a fail! Probalby infected with viruses, unlike Apple’s iCloud which doesn’t get viruses! HAHAHAHAHA! In the safe and secure world of Apple iPads and iCloud, who needs Winblows? HAHAHAHAHA!

    • markusdevine

      Your a funny little troll aren’t you? You keep coming back as “Guest”, but start your comments the same way all the time. Must be a 15 year old prepubescent little boy, with nothing better do do with yourself but try to get responses to start a fan war. F**k off and go do something worthwhile.

    • Anonymous

      Dont feed trolls :)

    • Guest

      Does mum know you’re on the internet?