News
Microsoft Gives Office 365 Customers 25 Percent Credit for Outage
- By Jeffrey Schwartz
- August 19, 2011
Microsoft on Thursday told Office 365 customers affected by this week's outage that it will deduct 25 percent from this month's bill.
The fledgling Office 365 service, launched in June, was down for several hours on Wednesday. The cause of the outage was a networking issue in one of Microsoft's North American datacenters.
A letter sent to customers was procured and posted by ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley. The company said it will provide the credit within 90 days. Customers will automatically receive the credit, the letter stated. A Microsoft spokeswoman confirmed that the company plans to issue the credit.
The outage was the first for Office 365, though Microsoft has experienced several outages with Office 365's predecessor, Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS). Microsoft's SkyDrive and Dynamics CRM Online services also experienced outages that day.
It is unclear how many customers were affected by this week's Office 365 outage. Since its June launch, Microsoft has only let new customers sign onto the service. The company plans to begin the process of transitioning BPOS customers to Office 365 next month.
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About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.