Monday, May 23, 2011

Exchange Online back to normal after 2 weeks of e-mail glitches

A series of issues has disrupted customers of Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) over the past couple of weeks, with services returning to normal only late on Friday. The service disruption has shaken confidence among both existing BPOS customers and those evaluating BPOS's successor service, Office365, which is currently in beta.

Exchange Online is the BPOS service that provides e-mail and calendaring to BPOS customers—perhaps the most important service provided by BPOS and Office365. Problems started on May 10th, when a malformed e-mail was improperly handled by Exchange, causing a large backlog of mail to form. It took Microsoft two-and-a-half hours to determine the root cause of the problem, and delays of six to nine hours were experienced by customers.

Two similar issues were then experienced on May 12, causing delays of a further three hours. That same day, a DNS failure occurred, leaving some customers unable to access mail through Outlook Web Access or ActiveSync.

The service seemed to be well for a few days, but another large backlog occurred on May 17, causing e-mail delivery delays of up to six hours, with similar problems on the 19th. The company is still working on a fix to the underlying problem.

All in all a grim couple of weeks for users of the service. Comments on the company's explanations of the issue pointed at widespread dissatisfaction with how the company had kept customers informed of problems, with some users threatening to switch to rival Google Apps. Microsoft cites its long history of providing enterprise services as one of the reasons that customers should prefer BPOS and Office365 over competing alternatives; disruption to such a fundamental service is likely to instill doubts in those considering switching to the cloud.

As with previous cloud service disruptions, the BPOS problems highlight one of the trade-offs that users of cloud services have to make. In normal day-to-day usage, the lack of administrative burden and ease of provisioning is a big win for the cloud services—but when things go wrong, customers are left helpless. While an on-premises e-mail system may suffer failures of its own, conscientious customers will have backup systems that can easily be brought online to minimize the disruption. Cloud-dependent customers seeking to avoid the overheads of system administration will tend to lack equivalent fallbacks, with occasional service outages being the price they pay.

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Jennifer Morrison Adrianne Palicki Amanda Righetti Michelle Branch Melissa Howard

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