Advertising violations

Summary: Repeated periods of downtime lead to concerns of false advertising and subsequent complaints

XBOX 360 became well known for the many class action lawsuits. It was a very defective product.

Now we see that that ASA, which we mentioned many times before [1, 2], is getting involved in the Office 365 (minus downtime) false advertising, right after another major downtime.

From The Register:

The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) is checking out a complaint about claims from Microsoft that it can guarantee 99.9 per cent uptime on its cloud services.

The Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) has been prone to outages. And even its successor, Office 365, has gone down twice since its launch in late June, leading some customers to dub it "Office 364".

On its promotional material, Redmond says of Office 365: "You can count on Microsoft, an industry leader in productivity, for reliability. Microsoft provides a financially-backed 99.9 per cent uptime guarantee."

The ASA confirmed to The Reg it was "investigating" a complaint over "marketing communication on Microsoft's website".

One reader has told us that some journalists may have been bribed to blame DNS and potentially save Microsoft billions. Their articles can be used by Microsoft lawyers as a cover-up. How despicable if true. ⬆