Microsoft Suffers Another Cloud Outage As Exchange Online Users Left In The Lurch

A day after Microsoft’s Lync instant messaging service suffered a global outage, its Exchange Online customers are now having problems with the cloud email service.

Customers began experiencing problems with Exchange Online a little after 8 a.m. ET Tuesday, according to posts on Microsoft's Office 365 community forum. Some customers reported being unable to send or receive emails from Exchange Online. Many customers reported experiencing long hold times when trying to contact Microsoft customer service representatives.

Microsoft's Office 365 Service Health Dashboard wasn't indicating any problems with the service, some customers noted.

Microsoft couldn't be reached for comment on the Exchange Online outage and has yet to share information with customers on the scope of the outage.

On the Office 365 forum, many customers are venting frustrations over what they consider to be an unsatisfactory level of communication from Microsoft regarding the outage.

"Can you give us anything in terms of an ETA, promise we wont hold you to it. ... But at least when we can give this to clients and upper levels breathing down our necks," one Microsoft customer pleaded on the forum.

’You can't cloak and dagger this type of an incident that is obviously affecting much of North America. You have IT people on this board and clogging your phone systems looking for some sort of information to feed their hundreds of thousands of cumulative users and thousands of bosses and clients," said another irate customer.

Some Exchange Online customers, fed up with the lack of information, took to Twitter to air their grievances.

Please! RT : how about an update on Exchange email outage? Businesses like mine are hurting due to this.

Dear , Yesterday's Lync outage and Yammer outage followed by today's Exchange outage has given me a sad. :(

In a bulletin posted to the Office 365 forum, Microsoft said degraded network infrastructure is what's causing the issues with Exchange Online. The company offered the same explanation for yesterday's Lync outage.

"Engineers have identified an issue in which a portion of capacity that facilitates connectivity to Exchange Online services has entered into a degraded state," according to a Microsoft bulletin posted to the Office 365 customer forum.

PUBLISHED JUNE 24, 2014

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