Microsoft’s Hotmail, other cloud services go offline due to a technical snag
Millions of users of Hotmail and other Microsoft services across the world could not access their online accounts Friday morning after the firm’s cloud services suffered a major technical snag. Microsoft’s Office 365, Hotmail, SkyDrive and other Live cloud-based products remained offline for several hours before the company restored the access.
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While Microsoft analyses the reason behind the glitch, it is being speculated that the problem occurred in the DNS address system. The unprecedented outage is certainly going to raise questions about the preference of cloud computing over traditional local storage. The glitch is also quite embarrassing for Microsoft, which has been pitting its Office 365 against Google’s online apps. It’s learnt that it was the second such technical snag in less than a month.
The latest snag is reported to have lasted for nearly two and a half hours, between 0300 GMT and 0530 GMT. In a blog, posted at 0649 GMT, Microsoft said: “We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers.”
“If you’ve been trying to use Hotmail, SkyDrive, or our other Live properties in the last couple of hours you may have noticed problems accessing our services. We’re aware of these issues and actively working to resolve them. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience,” wrote blogger Chris Jones.
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