Office 365 and Bing experience outages

Two of Microsoft's major online offerings, Office 365 and Bing, saw service interruptions in the last two days.

On Friday morning, Outlook.com (and by extension Office 365) experienced intermittent issues, ranging from trouble accessing Windows Intune and webmail to mail being inaccessible altogether.

The issues with 365 lasted for around two hours, though a message from the Office 365 and Windows Azure team suggested that the "short-term issue resulting from routine maintenance" only lasted a half hour.

Users across the web reported issues with Microsoft's Bing search service platform earlier today, which lasted for almost two hours until the service kicked back in on all browsers.

Getting Microsoft?

Microsoft's vague explanation of the "isolated technical issues" with Bing and the Office 365 outage do not appear to be related despite the proximity in timing.

While Microsoft didn't comment as to the specific cause for either of these outages, it seems that the software-developer-gone-web-host isn't without its seams.

And it's not alone, since Amazon's EC2 service and web host Go Daddy saw some serious down-time last year.

Even the U.S. government has had a hard time keeping all of its sites free from undesired interruptions.

But if Microsoft wants to start leaning heavily on leased copies of Office 13 (through Office 365) and capitalize on the potential of its Office 365 web apps, it will need to build real confidence in the service's stability.

If Bing goes down again, though, we'll just Google it.

Via TheNextWeb, ZDNet