The first email hit TechCrunch’s tip line at 11:32 EDT. Others quickly followed saying the same thing: major Microsoft cloud services are down worldwide. Hotmail, Skydrive, and Microsoft’s recently launched Google Docs competitor, Office 365 were all unaccessable. Users took to twitter and our tip line to express their rage, but then approximately four hours after going offline, the services were restored with little explanation for their downtime from Microsoft.
Official Microsoft blogs and Twitter accounts were busy putting out the small public relations flare ups, but these things happen and there was little spokespersons could do but tell users to sit tight. Servers can go down. Databases can be wiped. Power lines can be cut.
Full story: Microsoft’s cloud briefly evaporates, leaves up to 365 million users without access for four hours