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Microsoft suffered a major power failure overnight, leaving millions of users unable to access its online services. The BBC reports that Microsoft was still analyzing the cause of the problem on Friday morning, but said the outage appeared to be related to the internet's Domain Name Service address system.
"Continue working on service restoration for #Office365,” Microsoft tweeted through its official @Office365 account. “Seems to be DNS issue. Intermittent connectivity for all regions."
The disruption is believed to have lasted around two and a half hours, from 2300 Thursday night to 0130 Friday EDT.
Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows Live, Chris Jones, initially reported that the problem had been fixed, before updating the company’s blog with news of further disruptions. “We're aware of reports, including the comments posted below, that some customers still are seeing issues,” he wrote at 11pm Pacific Time on Thursday night (2am Friday EDT). “We are working on propagating the DNS config changes, and so it will take some time to restore service to everyone. Again, we appreciate your patience."
Microsoft launched Office 365, its cloud-based email service, in August. The BBC reports that the power outage “is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.”
