Summary: Microsoft continues to give online operations and online storage a bad name because of its sheer incompetence

ONLY when it happens to Google people tend to notice a downtime and publish reports about it, but Microsoft, whose Azure 'cloud' was once down for a whole day, receives almost no flak. Microsoft cannot beat Google because it uses an inferior stack that the London Stock Exchange (LSE) is dumping right now [1, 2]. Even Bing crashed and fell offline some months ago, which was hardly surprising.

Now we learn that Azure fell offline for over half of a working day, demonstrating yet again that Microsoft -- not computing over a network -- is the weakest link.

On the heels of my story about the Microsoft (MSFT) TechNet registration servers being down for five days, I received an email from a reader claiming that Microsoft Online Service, the current name for its cloud offerings, had a five hour outage. According to the tip, that included the hosted Exchange email service. This is clearly not the sort of thing corporations want to hear when considering who to trust going forward in cloud computing.

More here:

Microsoft’s cloud has been hiccuping all week, cutting North American customers off from access to the services included in its Business Productivity Online Suite, which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Office Live Meeting.

But wait. That's not all. There are other new examples.

The Zune downtime that we wrote about recently merely followed a longer Zune downtime from last year and now it seems like data is being lost too:

According to a post on the Zune Forums, owners of the Zune Pass are having a bit of trouble accessing the music they're paying for with their subscription, as first reported by Engadget. In less than two weeks, the thread in question has passed 50 replies as users complain and list what they can no longer access: specific songs, entire albums, or even everything produced by an artist.

This could be like SideKick all over again (but at a smaller scale because almost nobody uses a Zune). For details, see:

• Microsoft Pink is Already Declared Dead and Danger Dies with Permanent Data Loss
• Microsoft Sued for Data Loss
• Lawsuits Against Microsoft Turn to Class Action Lawsuit While Microsoft Mobiles Become Dying Breed
• Microsoft Recovers Sidekick Data? Not So Fast!
• Microsoft Sued for Sidekick Disaster, Fined for Using “Money Power” to “Harass” Defendants

Another new example comes from the Australian press, which writes about a Microsoft service that has been down for over a month.

Entrepreneur finds Microsoft closed for business

A PERTH small-business owner has been at his wits' end trying to register a legitimate copy of Microsoft Office on the software giant's own website.

Jim Embury, a safety and risk consultant for the oil industry, has been talking to Microsoft Australia's hotline personnel over the course of more than a week to resolve the matter, but there's no end in sight.

Microsoft's damage control comes from the 'Microsoft press', as usual. It's like a Microsoft outlet pretending to be official news.

From the same Australian publication happens to come the following report which is deceiving. It is just like BECTA in the UK where they talk about "savings" (on software that costs nothing to copy) but not about "expenses". It opens like this:

QUEENSLAND is set to save $10 million over three years because of a whole-of-government deal signed with Microsoft Australia late last year.

What an utterly poor opening. It pretends that by paying Microsoft, Queensland is actually receiving a payment. It's the art of spin. Australia in general is close to Microsoft, partly because it speaks English and trades with the US. We wrote about these factors many times before. That's another story altogether and it usually annoys the apolitical. ⬆