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Microsoft's Office 365, SkyDrive and CRM Online Services Hit by Outages (UPDATED)

• By Jeffrey Schwartz
• August 17, 2011

Several Microsoft cloud services, including Office 365, SkyDrive and CRM Online, experienced major outages on Wednesday.

According to a report by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley, users of CRM Online experienced slow performance to the point that some customers, both in North America and abroad, were unable to use it.

As for Office 365, this represents its first major outage since its launch in June. However, its predecessor, Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), experienced multiple high-profile outages this year.

It is not known how many Office 365 customers were affected, but the majority of Microsoft's hosted Exchange customers are still on BPOS. Microsoft plans to begin transitioning BPOS customers to Office 365 in September, though it is not clear whether Wednesday's outage will delay those migrations.

Steven Gerri, general manager of Microsoft's Global Foundation Services, said the outages are the result of a networking issue at one of the company's North American datacenters.

"At approximately 11:30 a.m. PDT, Microsoft became aware of a networking issue affecting customers of some Microsoft services hosted out of one of our North American data centers," Gerri said in a prepared statement. "We worked to isolate the issue and we are beginning to see service restoration. We continue to investigate the root cause of this issue."

UPDATE: Microsoft said as of late Wednesday afternoon, all systems are back up. The company is still investigating the root cause of the network failure.

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