Microsoft Office 365 suffers outage

Hosted services customers suffered disruption in early hours of this morning

Further questions have been raised over the reliability of Microsoft's cloud-based services following another outage overnight.

Office 365, Hotmail and Skydrive were among the online services globally affected in the early hours of this morning, due to a DNS issue.

The vendor used its official Office 365 Twitter feed at 4.43am to confirm it was investigating a service interruption.

Three hours later Microsoft's senior vice president for Windows Live, Chris Jones, said the issues appeared to be resolved.

"We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers," he said in a blog post. "...Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues."

It is not the first time Microsoft's hosted services have suffered disruption in recent weeks.

Rob Lovell, chief executive of ThinkGrid, said: "Microsoft's cloud services are again under fire and the recent Office 365 outage will not be helping matters. Common sense will tell anyone not to put all their eggs in one basket when it comes to IT. Hence relying on just one data centre to deliver critical business services to a range of companies across Europe (aside raising privacy concerns over where data is hosted) is extremely risky.

"Unnecessary risks such as these give the wider cloud computing industry a bad name. Resellers looking to partner with cloud providers to deliver services to their customers should know that an SLA based around this kind of practice isn't worth the paper it's written on."