Outlook.com users had to face an unusual situation a few days ago when many of them failed to access their accounts, People services and SkyDrive for up to three days. However, Microsoft has finally been able to resolve that issue, as the software giant made it known on August 17th through a problem report in which the company not only apologised to users on a number of occasions, but also explained what really happened and the measures it had taken to avoid such a situation in the future.
Outlook.com users first faced the issue on August 14. Although, the dashboard of Live.com of Microsoft had shown that the contact services and file storage has came online quite swiftly, but many of the Outlook.com users were unable to get rid of the issue for several hours and some even continue to face the same issue till August 17th morning.
However, this does not mean that Microsoft took a lot of time to take action, as the company posted details regarding the issue on the same day in which it also informed the users about two changes it has made to the service in order make it more resilient. The first change was increase in the bandwidth of the affected system, while the second change was the way handling of error is done by utilising Exchange ActiveSync. Here is an excerpt from the original problem report posted by Microsoft.
“Update and Resolution of Recent Outlook.com Outage We want to apologize to our customers who were affected by the outage on Outlook.com this week. We have restored access to all accounts and have made changes so that the service will be more resilient in the future. We realize that we have a responsibility to the customers who use our services to communicate and share with the people they care most about, and we apologize for letting those customers down this week. Our first priority is to the health of the services, and we will learn from this incident and work to improve the experience of all our customers.”
In the second part of the post, Microsoft explained the steps it had taken to deal with the issue and the cause of failure:
“This incident was a result of a failure in a caching service that interfaces with devices using Exchange ActiveSync, including most smart phones. The failure caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service. This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly, with the effect that some customers were unable to access their Outlook.com email and unable to share their SkyDrive files via email. In order to stabilize the overall email service, we temporarily blocked access via Exchange ActiveSync. This allowed us to restore access to Outlook.com via the web and restore the sharing features of SkyDrive.”
Latest Reports Reveal More Specs For Samsung Galaxy Gear Smartwatch
LG G2 Coming Soon to Canada
Lunches So Good Kids Can’t Ignore Them
Invigorating Ginger Smoothie
The U.K.’s Youngest Parents Ever
The new hair Jennifer Lawrence