Microsoft cloud services hindered by datacentre fault

The Microsoft Office 365 and Dynamics CRM cloud-based services partially failed on Wednesday for three hours, preventing customers in the US from accessing some features, including email services.

The outage began at 7:30pm BST on Wednesday, and affected a number of Microsoft's cloud services, including Office 365 and the company's customer relationship management (CRM) suite, Dynamics CRM, for users in the US. Microsoft later confirmed that the problems were restricted to US customers only.

"CRM2011 is down for my organisation — I have a called [sic] into support. Just checking to see if it is down for more than just us," Twitter user 'pyrofenix' wrote.

A number of problems were also posted on the official Office 365 support forums, largely complaining of an inability to access emails.

"My Outlook cannot connect to the server and when I log on to the web portal, I can log on. But when I click on Outlook, it displays 'HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable'," user 'jgc' wrote on Wednesday.

The official Microsoft Office 365 Twitter stream also posted details of the issues as they arose.

"Investigating service issues. Expect more service updates will be available via the Service Health Dashboard," it said in a post to Twitter. The company said it was beginning to restore services around two hours later, with everything returning to normal an hour after that. 

"At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American datacentres," Steven Gerri, manager of Microsoft global foundation services said in a statement. "We worked to isolate the issue and all services have been restored. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue.”

Microsoft launched the cloud-based Office 365 suite on 28 June. It provides a number of the same services as its predecessor, the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) but is geared towards small-to-medium size businesses as well as enterprises. 

At the end of June, the BPOS service also suffered an outage that prevented some customers from accessing Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint features. It too was blamed on a datacentre fault.