Buckle up, because there's turbulence in the cloud. With its transition to Office 365, Microsoft has said that its soon-to-be-grounded Office Live service has struggled with access for its small business customers.
"This past week some Office Live Small Business customers may have experienced intermittent access to their accounts and Web sites," product manager Steve Brown wrote in a blog post. "The issue has been resolved and the service is now functioning normally. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience."
The Redmond-based technology giant has not yet explained what caused the outage or how many customers suffered from the "intermittent" issues.
According to The Register, Office 365 will replace Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). While Office Live still has legs, the transition is expected to vaporize Office Live Small Business and Live@edu.
Office 365 was introduced as a beta last month, and is a collection of cloud-based versions of Microsoft business products, including Microsoft Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. Despite its promise of 99.9 percent uptime, however, the service has suffered from early hiccups. Immediately after the beta's launch, technical questions and complaints piled up from Office 365 community members, most related to SharePoint Online, Lync interoperability with Mac, and Exchange mobile syncing.
Microsoft isn't the only technology company to struggle with cloud-based services. When Apple transitioned from .Mac to MobileMe, customers reported a slew of problems, including the inability to access email. A new profile of Steve Jobs claims that the Apple chief was irate at the failure of MobileMe, berating workers in a town hall meeting and replacing the team's boss.