Web services of both Microsoft and Google were reported down on Friday due to major technical snags. While Google promptly responded to its services outage in minutes, but for Microsoft it took days to actually restore back its email and web services – Outlook.com and SkyDrive.
Interestingly, Microsoft was apologetic to its users and came out with a detailed note on the failure of Outlook and SkyDrive services but the search giant Google has remained silent so far. In fact, Google’s Apps Status Dashboard, which represents a tabular chart of company’s list of some 16 web services that includes Gmail, Google Drive, Google Talk and others were marked in pink dots pointing to service outage status on 17 August.
Beside the graphics, Google’s Apps Status Dashboard had put a small note that stated, “We’re aware of a problem with [app name] affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access [app name], but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behaviour. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 10:37 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change. The incident lasted 1-5 minutes.”
Google, however, hasn’t come out with any official statement pointing at specifics of the service outage that disrupted its web services for almost 5 minutes, affecting company’s 40% global traffic as reported by an analytic firm GoSquared.
On other side, Microsoft has been fighting to keep its email and web service Outlook.com up and running for past few months. The recent service outage faced by Outlook.com users lasted for 3 days. And Microsoft has been apologetic on the technical failure and came out with details on why the service outage had occurred.
Unlike Google, Microsoft in its message to users on 17 August said, “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.”
Microsoft, further explaining the technicalities stated, “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,” company added.
To fix up the issue, Microsoft has enhanced its system by increasing network bandwidth and changed the error handling process linked with devices using Exchange ActiveSync. Moreover, the company informed that it will continue to monitor its system and make additional changes as required to keep services up.
“We will continue to monitor the system and make additional changes as needed to keep the service healthy. We are now fully through the backlog and have restored service so all customers should have normal access from all of their devices. We want to apologize to everyone who was affected by the outage, and we appreciate the patience you have shown us as we worked through the issues,” Microsoft said in the note.
Between 13 June to 18 August, Microsoft’s email service Outlook.com has gone down for 18 times and service disruption time ranged from minutes to long days.