Microsoft Office 365 hits pothole

It’s Microsoft’s turn to have a bad day at the office. On Friday morning, Microsoft Office 365 users reported the cloud-based service is down in part or as a whole over the past few hours, according to the Office 365 community forum. The timing may be due to the broad launch of  Office 2013 and Office 365 Home Premium just three days ago, according to ZDnet blogger Ed Bott in a tweet.

More here from  Neowin.net and Engadget and ZDnet.
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This snafu — which appears to be resolved — comes a few weeks after a Hotmail and Outlook outage. Microsoft resolved that issue in a day,  although judging from comments on GigaOM’s January 8 post, the problems persisted for some users.

This has been a bad week for a lot of online services, with both Twitter and Amazon.com (no not AWS — Amazon.com) experiencing glitches yesterday. But Microsoft faces unique issues as it tries to move more of its productivity applications revenue over to a subscription-based SaaS model without denting its juggernaut on-premises Office business. The growing popularity of Google Apps makes this a particularly pressing issue for Microsoft.

Microsoft has been contacted for a comment. Story will be updated when they get back.

Update: According to a statement emailed by a company spokesman:

“Some Microsoft services experienced a short-term issue as a result of a networking adjustment. We worked quickly to roll back the adjustments made and all services are now restored to normal.”

This story was updated at 11:00 a.m. PDT with Microsoft comment.

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