Microsoft Blames DNS Issue For Office 365, Windows Live Cloud Outage
"We are investigating service interruption," Microsoft wrote on its Office 365 Twitter stream around midnight Eastern Friday. "Will update as soon as more details are available or within hour."
The late night into early morning cloud outages mark the second major bout of downtime for Microsoft Office 365, which suffered its first outage last month, less than two months after Microsoft officially launched Office 365. Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft's suite of cloud applications, was launched as a new and more reliable alternative to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). In the months leading up to Office 365's release, BPOS frequently battled cloud outage demons.
Roughly an hour after acknowledging the interruption, Microsoft said it appeared a DNS issue was causing the Office 365 cloud outage.
"Still working to restore service," Microsoft wrote. "Preliminary root cause suggests a DNS issue, though we're still working hard to restore."
Microsoft Office 365 cloud services were back online roughly three hours after Microsoft began investigating the interruptions, around 2:45 a.m. Eastern.
"We believe service restored for all Office365. If customers are still having issues, please let us know. Thanks for your patience," Microsoft wrote.
Along with Office 365 taking a services hit overnight, Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail, SkyDrive and other Live services also had issues last Thursday night into Friday morning.
According to Microsoft's Windows Live Blog, Hotmail, SkyDrive and other Live properties were inaccessible to some users around midnight Eastern Friday. According to Microsoft, services were being restored around 12:45 a.m. Eastern, but issues persisted until after 2 a.m. Eastern.
"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers. Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues," Microsoft wrote at 2:49 a.m. Eastern.
It was unclear Friday if how many users were affected by the cloud outages.
Friday's outages come on the heels of Microsoft cloud rival Google suffering an outage with its Google Docs cloud productivity suite, which caused some Google Docs services to be inaccessible late Wednesday.