Microsoft has hit a bumpy road today with its cloud services. It was first reported that its Office 365 was experience a disruption and not long after that its SkyDrive service was also experiencing a similar issue.
Microsoft has officially commented on the issue. In a statement to Neowin they have said:
“At approximately 11:30am PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers. We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue.” - Steven Gerri, General Manager, Global Foundation Services
Both Office 365 and SkyDrive have deployed fixes for their respective issues and service should be restored at this time.
For users of the Cloud, downtime such as this is a stark reminder that they are not in control of their data. As corporations try to entice users to move to the cloud, they must be ready and willing to deal with all outages such as these.
Fortunately for Microsoft, the outage was only a couple of hours. A fast response time helped to mitigate the fear of the Cloud going down for days at a time.