Microsoft Apologizes For Widespread Outlook Outage

Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its Hotmail users towards the new Outlook.com email service, claiming that the new service is a lot better. That may be true, except that Outlook.com recently went down for a long time, being inaccessible to a lot of users. The company has now officially apologized for it.


Outlook

On Tuesday afternoon, Outlook.com was not accessible to a number of users. The problem continued well until Wednesday morning and though Microsoft claimed that it was limited in its scope, a huge number of users reported that they were experiencing problems in accessing the service.

The Outlook.com status page is a fine gauge of measuring the service’s status. During the outage, this status page was fraught with red warnings, citing that the issue was widespread and affected many users.

Eventually, Microsoft had to amend its stance and has now dished out an official apology, stating the reasons why the service went down. According to vice president Arthur de Haan, “On the afternoon of the 12th, in one physical region of one of our datacenters, we performed our regular process of updating the firmware on a core part of our physical plant. This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way. This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter. This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter.”

Source: Microsoft

Courtesy: Business Insider

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

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