It looks like Microsoft BPOS isn’t going to go quietly into that dark night. Less than a week before the offering is officially rendered obsolescent by the launch of the Microsoft Office 365 cloud suite, BPOS users started experiencing issues when sending and receiving e-mails. The outage only lasted about three hours, but it left users frustrated — whatever glitch hit Microsoft’s cloud also took down the BPOS Service Health Dashboard.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley has the blow-by-blow of the outage. But the upshot is users in North America started experiencing the issue around 11 a.m. Eastern time, and Microsoft Online Services went public with it about an hour later on its Twitter feed. While this was occurring, some users couldn’t so much as get into the Outlook Web App, and BPOS support wasn’t much help since users couldn’t even generate a trouble ticket.
Judging from the comments Foley culled from the Microsoft BPOS forums, it sounds as though the issue was with sign-on, since users who had already logged in were experiencing no problems. By 12:30 p.m., Microsoft reported, again on Twitter, that it had identified the problem, and it was solved and the service was back to full functionality by 2:25 p.m.
For most enterprises, even three hours of downtime is unacceptable. That said, it’s better than the several days in May during which Microsoft BPOS users encountered similar problems.
I think there’s some concern over whether Microsoft Office 365 might be more reliable than BPOS – Microsoft says it is, but competitors including Google are quick to cast doubt. But will this bad buzz affect Office 365′s short-term viability in the marketplace? TalkinCloud will be watching closely, so keep reading.
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