Microsoft’s Office 365 seems to be experiencing some outages.
"We apologize for the inconvenience that the Office 365 outage has caused today. We re sic are working on resolving the issue," read an Aug. 17 tweet posted at 3:30 EST on Microsoft’s cloud-services Twitter account.
Around 20 minutes later, Microsoft’s official Office 365 Twitter account posted: "Investigating service issues. Expect more service updates will be available via the Service Health Dashboard."
Meanwhile, some Office 365 customers seemed less than pleased with the outage. "The Web interface is 503 error, our exchange clients are all offline," read a typical post on one Office 365 forum. Some of them have come back online, but it looks like they are the exception, not the rule. Others also reported issues with accessing the platform s service status page.
"Office in the Cloud just Evaporated," wrote another on the same forum. "Need some new weather patterns."
As of 5 p.m. EST on Aug. 17, Microsoft spokespeople had yet to respond to eWEEK’s request for comment on when full Office 365 service will be restored and what technical issues, if any, caused the problem.
Microsoft launched the final version of Office 365, its cloud-based productivity software, with a June event in New York City hosted by CEO Steve Ballmer. The platform links Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online into a platform that costs $2 to $27 per user per month. On top of that, Microsoft is offering an Office 365 Marketplace with productivity applications and professional services.
For several months, Microsoft has pushed an all-in cloud strategy centered on subscription products like Office 365. By embracing the industry-wide trend toward the cloud, the company hopes to diversify its revenue stream beyond desktop software such as Windows. Moreover, placing companies and consumers on a subscription model ultimately yields more revenue than a single copy of software, provided the customers in question keep paying for a sustained period of time.
To read the original eWeek article, click here: Microsoft’s Office 365 Hit By Outages: Reports