Any major cloud service outage is bad, but good communications can make it less stressful. Microsoft did OK with last night's Exchange Online outage.
My personal domain is run on Office 365. I've generally been very happy with it, but last night was one of those times that makes for unhappy customers: a major outage.
Late in the evening email just stopped working. Multiple computers and devices on different networks were all timing out on Exchange Activesync access so it seemed pretty clearly to be the service. I also couldn't log into the Office 365 web portal.
At this point, my first thought was to check the Office 365 Twitter feed; surely Microsoft would post notice of a major outage there. But there was no sign of anything wrong, so I asked.
The Office Twitter folks seemed to know nothing about it, but another user told me there was a "major outage". At this point I thought to check the service status page for my account. Below are the content for the full incident last night. When I first checked, only the bottom 2 or 3 statuses were up.
Read more at: Office 365 outage Thursday night | ZDNet