Another BPOS outage for Microsoft
Lightning bolt reportedly affects services across Europe for seven hours as Amazon also suffers
Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) continues to be beset by outages, with customers across Europe experiencing problems for almost seven hours yesterday.
Microsoft has issued a statement confirming that "a widespread power outage in Dublin caused connectivity issues". The software giant claimed the disruption began at about 6.50pm BST yesterday evening, continuing until 1.45am.
"Throughout the incident, we updated our customers regularly on the issue via our normal communication channels," added the statement.
The problems are widely reported to have been brought about by a lightning bolt causing power interruptions in the Irish capital. Amazon's EC2 cloud services were also affected and are still not fully operational as of this morning.
A statement to customers on the Amazon Web Services Service Health Dashboard said: "We know many of you are anxiously waiting for your instances and volumes to become available and we want to give you more detail on why the recovery of the remaining instances and volumes is taking so long.
"Due to the scale of the power disruption, a large number of EBS servers lost power and require manual operations before volumes can be restored. Restoring these volumes requires that we make an extra copy of all data, which has consumed most spare capacity and slowed our recovery process."
BPOS Customers in the US and Europe have suffered a series of outages since the back end of last year, with three happening since May. Microsoft is in the process of shifting customers and partners towards the successor to BPOS, Office 365, which was launched in June.
Writing in analyst TechMarketView's UKHotViews service, research director Angela Eager claimed the latest incident will have done "little to calm the nerves of BPOS customers".
"To be fair, there are some things that Microsoft and other providers do not have control over," she wrote. "They can do something about failover and mirrored datacentres, however, and the immediate question is why was there no such backup in place."
Eager added that the outage could also cause end users to feel more jittery about using cloud providers of all stripes.
"This latest problem will also fire off wider questions about the viability of the cloud as a delivery platform," she wrote. "The questions are valid, indeed necessary, as they are part of the ongoing process of improving the whole cloud operation. Outages are not a sign that cloud does not work, however."