Microsoft recently apologized for Outlook.com's outage which dragged on for around three days. The software problem kept several users from accessing their email as well as the People app and SkyDrive cloud storage.
The apology letter from Microsoft in its status dashboard said all of the services were now restored. However, reports said its calendar app is down for various people.
Analysts said the outage would give Microsoft a bad reputation considering the company's Scroogled ad campaign. Microsoft's advertisements have been trying to scare users away from Google's Gmail and towards its own Outlook.com. In March 2013, another Outlook.com outage transpired which initially forced the tech giant to apologize. The company's Office 365 was also said to be very reliable. Microsoft's credibility is currently in question after the company's big promotion of its cloud technology to attract business customers.
In comparison, Google's downtime last Friday lasted only for a couple of minutes. The crashed services of Google took 40% of the online traffic with it but it also showed Google's power to instantly solve the problems.
The Online Services Division of Microsoft reported an USD8.1 billion loss last year. Two quarters ago, it was able to reduce it to only USD262 million. The company's fourth financial quarter for 2013 which was posted last month showed a revenue increase of 9% for the Online Services Division with a loss of USD372 million.
Join the Conversation