Microsoft Online Services strives to provide exceptional service for all of our customers. On January 28, customers served from a North America data center may have experienced intermittent access to services included in the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you and your employees.

We hold ourselves to the very highest standard. And yesterday, we didn’t meet it. The connectivity issue underlined our commitment to service excellence, and all resources were brought to bear to correct and learn from the issue at hand.  Within our team, we approach things with a “better every day” attitude; where we will continuously learn and improve to ensure customers can rely on Microsoft now and in the future. This includes customer communication. We are committed to communicating with our customers in an open and honest manner about service issues and the steps we’re taking to prevent recurrences. Based on customer feedback, we are actively working to improve our incidence response communications.

In the meantime, this is a summary of yesterday’s issue:

• What happened?  
• Monitoring alerted us to a possible issue with networking.
• Troubleshooting procedures ultimately pointed to a problem with network infrastructure, resulting in intermittent access for customers.

• What actions have been taken to prevent a recurrence?
• We have identified the root cause, and have taken steps to remediate the network issues.

We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business. As a gesture of our commitment to ensuring the highest quality service experience, we are proactively reaching out to impacted customers to provide a credit.

We encourage customers to contact us with any additional questions. Our customer support is available 24 hours a day by telephone or via Service Requests submitted from the Microsoft Online Services Administration Center.

We thank our customers for choosing Microsoft Online Services to host their business productivity applications. We aim to live up to your – and our own – expectations every day.

Sincerely,

Michael Ziock

Sr. Director, Business Productivity Online Service Operations

The Microsoft Online Services Team