Microsoft Seeks Specific Cause Of Wednesday Service Outages

While Microsoft did not specify which services were affected by the problem, customers reported problems accessing Microsoft's Office 365 cloud application suite, the Dynamics CRM Online application and the Windows Live SkyDrive file hosting service.

Between 11:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. PDT Wednesday, "a network connectivity issue resulted in loss of service for some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers," said Steven Gerri, general manager of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, in a statement.

All services were restored Wednesday evening and Gerri said Microsoft will "continue to investigate the root cause of this issue."

A Twitter feed for Skydrive said at 3:45 p.m. PDT Wednesday that it had "deployed a fix" to restore service and referred to the outage as a "hiccup."

Office 365 just launched June 28 and this would be the first reported outage for that service. But Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) service has suffered a number of outages over the last two years.