Microsoft got hit with another unexpected outage for its cloud-based services such as Hotmail and its Skydrive data storage feature. The down time began late on Thursday night Eastern time and seemed to last a few hours. In a post on Microsoft"s Windows Live blog site, the company said that it was "aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them." Later in the evening, Microsoft updated the blog, stating, "We believe we have restored service for all customers at this time. We will continue our investigation into the root cause of these issues and post an update following our investigation."
Even with this announcement some users were still unable to access their Hotmail or Skydrive accounts. Microsoft said this was due to DNS propagation issues. Later it updated the blog site, saying, "We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers. Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network." Microsoft has still not yet revealed what caused the outage at the time of this news post.
This is the second time inside a month that Microsoft has had to deal with some unexpected down time for its cloud-based services. On August 17, the company got hit with some disruptions in its Skydrive service along with its Office 365 cloud-based software suite. The outage lasted a few hours. Later Microsoft said the cause of the problem was "a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers." The company offered some credit to its Office 365 customers as compensation for the down time.