UK authorities investigating Microsoft's 99.9 percent cloud claim
The UK's advertising agency is investigating Microsoft regarding its claims that the software giant "can guarantee 99.9 percent uptime" of its Office 365 cloud service.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) is the UK's independent regulator of advertising across all media, including marketing on websites and online spaces.
In another life, Microsoft's BPOS (Business Productivity Online Suite) was known for its outages. Reborn into Office 365, Microsoft had made it clear that the old was out and the new was in. The service has, however, suffered a number of outages since its inception, forcing the advertising watchdog to question the company's claims.
Though Microsoft is often quick to explain why outages occur, many have complained before that the company is not forthcoming with solutions during the downtime -- let alone reflecting downtime or outage issues in the service's dashboard or health status reports.
The ASA confirmed last week that it was "investigating" a complaint over "marketing communication on Microsoft's website", questioning whether the "99.9 percent uptime was misleading and could be substantiated".
Microsoft's promotional material for Office 365 says clearly:
"You can count on Microsoft, an industry leader in productivity, for reliability. Microsoft provides a financially-backed 99.9% uptime guarantee."
The ASA recently ruled in favour of Apple over Samsung to challenge which smartphone giant could call their respective phones the "world's thinnest smartphone", at least within British territory.
Microsoft has not responded to questions at the time of publication.
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