Outlook.com Goes Dark This Time: Can Microsoft Run Cloud Services?

 

As reported by ZDnet on the Feb 25th, Microsoft’s new Outlook.com service suffered an outage lasting more than seven (7) hours.  Many customers could not log in, and those that could experiences significant performance issues.

Even more disturbing, Microsoft did not acknowledge the outage until over 4 hours into the incident, via Twitter.  And,  7 hours into the outage, the outlook.com status page failed to note the outage at all.

This outage follows two Office 365 Outages totaling more than 9.5 hours of down-time in November, 2012.

While Microsoft has not commented on the cause of the Outlook.com outage, their apology to customers back in November disclosed that Microsoft cannot dynamically add and allocate resources to their infrastructure.  The best they can do is improve their ability to recovery (related: Microsoft’s Apology Says Volumes about Office 365 Outages).

With a history of operational failures and acknowledged limitations in the underlying architecture, one has to wonder how well Microsoft is able to manage multi-tenant services.  Will the pattern of failures lead to a lack of trust?