Microsoft officials warned customers of its BPOS bundle of hosted Exchange, SharePoint and Lync on Monday, May 10, that an upgrade of Exchange Online was slated to begin on May 12. Microsoft didn;t tell users to expect any downtime as a result of the upgrade. It seems something went wrong before May 12’s upgrade ever began. Users are reporting there have been intermittent, multi-hour Exchange Online outages on May 10, 11 and 12 at different times in North America, Europe and Asia.
Clients were unable to access e-mail, but as of Thursday Microsoft stated that the system was running normally. In the wake of the recent cloud failure at Amazon.com, there is an increasing spotlight in the negative aspects of doing business in the Clouds. Business continuity is very important to the viability, both long-term and short-term, to firms who use cloud providers. The business continuity however needs to also extend to the provider, even when they are attempting to do upgrades to their Cloud network.