Businesses in the United States were disrupted as a prolonged outage of Microsoft's business services halted all corporate communications. Users vented out on Twitter, saying that they are not able to send and receive e-mail messages to their colleagues and clients.
A spokeswoman from Microsoft confirmed the service outage, and that the disruption is affecting the Exchange Online service, which many businesses use for their e-mail, contacts and calendar needs.
Microsoft's official Twitter account for Office 365 also acknowledged the service outage, asking users to refer to their service health dashboard for updates as engineers attempted to fix the problem.
However, according to the service health dashboard, all Microsoft systems were operational during the time of the service outage.
Microsoft was only able to resolve the Exchange Online service issue in the late afternoon, when undelivered e-mails began entering the inboxes of users. However, the company did not disclose any details regarding the number of users affected and the causes of the service outage.
While Microsoft Outlook is not a front runner in personal e-mail usage, it has been the dominant e-mail management program among businesses. Microsoft is serving about 50 million employees with its cloud-based office services, amid competition from Google and its own host of cloud-based office services.
Microsoft reported that the company receives 58 percent of its worldwide revenue from businesses. However, as of 2012, estimates of analysts show that Google had taken control of between a third and a half of the market for cloud-based e-mail services for businesses.
The company has a renewed focus on the further development and improvement of cloud services, with Microsoft tapping former enterprise and services group head Satya Nadella as the company's new CEO in February this year. Nadella has had a busy first few months as Microsoft chief, including forging a partnership with once rival Salesforce to boost the company's cloud-based service offerings.
However, with this Exchange Online outage almost immediately following another widespread Microsoft disruption, it seems that the company still needs improvements on this end.
Lync, the company's online communications service, just also recently suffered from a service disruption, which the company said was caused by issues in the network routing infrastructure.
The disruption came as Microsoft looked to prove that the company can make it easier for their clients to send messages and share documents through the Internet. Office 365, which hosts the Outlook e-mail service, added several online features as a response to the growing popularity of the Google Doc online products.
