Microsoft: Office 365 outages ‘will’ happen

Microsoft officially launched its cloud-based productivity suite, Office 365, a few days ago and now the company is saying that it cannot guarantee the uptime.

With recent Business Productivity Online Suite outages, many consumers were hoping that Office 365 would be eliminate any negative experiences that took place during the outages.

“Office 365 with 2010 technology was designed from the ground up to be multi-tenanted – cloud, on-premise and hosted environments – and by the nature that it is designed to work in those environments it will be more resilient,” said Microsoft Cloud UK Lead, Peter King.

“However, I have to say outages are going to happen, but what is important is how you deal with them and the SLAs that you put round it. If it happens, we have SLAs that give money back [to customers] if we have an outage,” King said.

Microsoft provides its customers a 25% discount off their monthly payment if uptime falls below 99.9% to 99%, and a 50% discount is it falls below 99%, and a 100% discount if uptime falls below 95%.

King stated that Microsoft prefers that no issues took place, but “the processes in place are robust and financially backed, if you look across cloud providers in the market that is unique.”

Apparently, Microsoft can guarantee 100% uptime, but customers would have to pay an increased price per month for that service. But the big question is, would consumers want to pay that price? “The research we’ve done suggests no,” replied King.