Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) suffered an outage last night, thanks to network hardware issues.
Users in the US were having problems signing into Exchange Online and accessing the Health Dashboard, leading to a string of complaints on Microsoft's forums. One user claimed customers in London were also experiencing the downtime.
The software giant confirmed the problem around 6pm BST yesterday on its @msonline Twitter feed and less than an hour later acknowledged it was a hardware issue in the network.
However, even when the components had been replaced, services were still difficult to access for another two hours, frustrating users further.
A post on the forum from BeverleySeche read: "I'm very disappointed in BPOS. This is the 4th [episode of downtime] in 2 months and this is supposed to be reliable."
"We went from in house groupwise to hosted Microsoft BPOS. Not only [are we] getting a culture shock, we're getting downtime."
The next version of BPOS Office 365 is expected to launch next week, but with continuing questions over the current version's downtime, it may launch under a cloud of its own.
However, a Microsoft technician posted on its Twitter feed that Office 365 "should provide a more stable service" and claimed "reports and expectations [were] very good."
