Last night (my time) TweetDeck exploded with a mass of customer complaints, observations, witticisms, and moaning about the problems that afflicted the Exchange Online component of Office 365. On this occasion I wasn’t affected because the network problem that Microsoft reported as the root cause only caused problems for their North American datacenters, meaning that users in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (and possibly elsewhere) bore the brunt of the outage.

The last BPOS outage was closer to home because it happened down the road from me in Dublin, Ireland on August 7. Originally reported as due to a lightning strike (an unusual occurrence in Dublin!), the outage was later traced to a problem in the power network that served both Microsoft’s and Amazon’s datacenters and brought their cloud services crashing to a halt. That outage had prompted me to start composing a commentary outlining the need for technical staff to become involved when companies negotiate SLAs with cloud providers. Last night’s tweeting provided more proof of the point I wanted to make. You can read the commentary on WindowsITPro.com.

– Tony