Office not so 365

Microsoft’s Azure Cloud service failed at almost exactly midnight last night, taking down hundreds of websites who may have thought that hardware redundancy could magically protect them from sysadmin oopses, as well as users of Xbox live and Microsoft’s flagship service Office 365.

Viva Zorggroep, a Dutch healthcare organisation with 4,000 employees, said it had also been affected as a consequence of adopting Microsoft’s online apps.

“At this time, our supporting departments such as finance, HR, education, IT et cetera are working with Office 365,” said Dave Thijssen, an IT manager at the company.

“This morning these servers were unresponsive, which means users were not able to log in to Office 365.

“As a result they had no access to email, calendars, or – most importantly – their documents and Office Online applications.

“We also had trouble reporting the outage to our users as most of digital communication – email, Lync, intranet/Sharepoint – was out.

The outage persisted for over five hours for some customers and apparently there are still latency issues at this time. This is of course a violation of the Service Level Agreement… so you can keep a nickel or two of your monthly rent, I bet.

Leave a Reply