Microsoft fixes Exchange Online outage after almost 9 hours

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The company pinned the blame on a networking infrastructure failure

Microsoft has finally fixed an Exchange Online outage that left affected users without access to email for almost nine hours on Tuesday, prompting many to vent their frustration online as they struggled to get their work done.

The company hasn't said how many customers were impacted, but judging by the volume of complaints posted in discussion forums and social media sites, it must have hit a substantial number of users.

Plus, the length of the outage, and the fact that it struck during U.S. work hours, makes it a significant and embarrassing one for Microsoft, which is locked in a fight with Google in the cloud communication and collaboration software market.

Exchange Online is sold as a standalone service, and also as a component of Office 365, Microsoft's cloud communication and collaboration suite for businesses, schools, government agencies and nonprofit organizations.

In an update posted in page 15 of a discussion thread in the Office 365 support forum, a Microsoft representative declared that the service had been restored around 6 p.m. U.S. Eastern Time. The outage hit shortly after 9 a.m.

"Investigation determined that a portion of the networking infrastructure entered into a degraded state. Engineers made configuration changes on the affected capacity to remediate end-user impact," wrote the Microsoft support official, identified as David Zhang.

A common theme among affected users who complained online was that Microsoft was slow to acknowledge the outage and didn't communicate well with customers. Many felt that the Office 365 status dashboard wasn't updated quickly enough to reflect the problem.

A good sample of these complaints is encapsulated in the reactions to this update Microsoft posted to the Office 365 Twitter account at one point during the afternoon.

Outages such as this one create difficult situations for IT departments whose companies have shut down their on-premises servers and switched to vendor-hosted cloud services like Office 365. In these situations, IT pros have little to no control over the outage and yet have to field queries and complaints from their angry users.

Inevitably, these types of outages also trigger second-guessing of the decision to move to cloud services and give up the inherent control of running one's own servers for email and other applications. This second-guessing is usually directed at the high-level IT executive who pushed for the move to the cloud, like CIOs, CTOs and IT managers.

Office 365 comes in a variety of editions that vary in price and in the applications and tools they include. Most Office 365 editions come with Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and OneDrive for Business, and some also include the full-featured Office productivity app suite.

The basic version of Office 365 for Education, called A2, is free, while the most sophisticated version for businesses, Office 365 Enterprise E4, costs US$22 per user, per month and includes a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

A Microsoft spokeswoman contacted via email acknowledged the problem, but didn't provide details about the number of customers affected.

Microsoft kills off plan to pay people to write good things about Internet Explorer

It was only a couple days ago when Microsoft released its Internet Explorer Developer Channel, “a fully functioning browser designed to give Web developers and early adopters a sneak peek at the Web platform features we’re working on.” Any chance IE might have gotten some long-term social media love was dashed after a clueless “social strategist on behalf of Microsoft” invited the wrong person to write something positive about Internet Explorer.

The “wrong” person was TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington who posted the unsolicited blog-for-pay letter on Uncrunched. The “strategist” was from the advocate marketing firm SocialChorus, which lists Bing as a customer. In part, the message stated:

The new Internet Explorer is a brand new experience with many different features. This reworked Internet Explorer lets you search smarter and do more with its cool new features, such as multitasking, pinnable sites, and full-screen browsing.

In this program, we are looking to spread the word about the new Internet Explorer web experience in a cool, visual way, which is where you come in! Internet Explorer has teamed up with many partners in gaming, entertainment, and more, and we’d love to see you talk about your opinions on these collaborations.

“Compensation” as well as “fun prizes and rewards” were offered for writing a flattering Internet Explorer post. SocialChorus asked bloggers to use specific hashtags. Instead of positive reviews however, the hashtags #IEbloggers and #reThinkIE have turned into more IE bashing tools. Some of those tweets are funny!

Additionally SocialChorus asked “rethink Internet Explorer” bloggers to sign a contract and receive “program access where you will see cool social content, the complete blog post prompt, and all required blog assets." In order to be compensated, you must "Share your post or related photos with our hashtag (#IEbloggers) on 2 to 3 social networks (Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter)."

The link with more details about the program has since been deleted (you can see it in full here) but not before it caught the eye of Google’s Matt Cutts, who is the head of Google’s webspam team. Cutts tweeted that he was “asking for more info while the webspam team investigates.”

Both Google and Bing have policies about passing links from paid posts; Google penalized Chrome back in 2012 for a sponsored post scheme, meaning searching for “browser” on Google would not bring up Chrome.

Meanwhile Microsoft PR damage-control went into overdrive. Arrington later updated the post with Microsoft’s comment: “This action by a vendor is not representative of the way Microsoft works with bloggers or other members of the media. The program has been suspended.”

Just the same, SocialChorus had asked for the glowing Internet Explorer posts to be up by July 10, so if people who signed contracts weren’t informed that Microsoft yanked the money, you still might see some pro-IE posts around that time.

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Google unseats Microsoft as the U.S. browser powerhouse

Google's strength in mobile browsing pushes it past Microsoft's Internet Explorer

Google has unseated rival Microsoft as the leading browser maker in the U.S. for the first time, Adobe said this week, citing data from its analytics platform.

The rise in Google's domestic fortunes followed Microsoft's reduction to second fiddle worldwide in May 2013.

According to the Adobe Digital Index (ADI), a measurement of browser usage based on tracking visits to the average U.S. website, Google's desktop and mobile browsers -- Chrome on both platforms, the aging Android browser on the latter only -- slipped past Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE), which retained its premier position on the desktop but had little to show for its effort on smartphones.
U.S. browser share chart
The U.S. browser war reached a milestone in April as Google replaced Microsoft as the No. 1 maker of Web browsers, said Adobe. (Image: Adobe.)

For April, Google accounted for 31.8% of all browser usage in the United States. Meanwhile, Microsoft owned a 30.9% share.

Apple's Safari was in third place with a combined desktop and mobile share of 25%, while Mozilla's Firefox, which lacks a meaningful presence in mobile, was a distant fourth with just 8.7%.

The rise of Google's browsers, and to a lesser extent Apple's Safari, and the corresponding declines of both IE and Firefox, can be attributed to mobile browsing, primarily that conducted on smartphones. "Today, mobile [operating systems are] more important, giving Google and Apple a leg up with default status on Android and iOS," said ADI analyst Tyler White in a statement.

Adobe tallied visits, which in analytics parlance is synonymous with a session on a website, a period during which a user may view numerous pages before leaving, or before a time limit of inactivity expires. Adobe thus actually measures a type of "usage share," or how active users of each browser are on the Web.

Other analytic firms count differently. California-based Net Applications uses visitors, an expression of the number of unique individuals -- actually their browsers, as the tracking is done with cookies -- to measure "user share," which is analogous to the number of copies of each browser in use during a specific period.

Because Adobe drew its data only from consumer-facing sites -- some 10,000 of them during April -- it was little surprise that the Chrome/Android browsers outpaced IE. Microsoft's browser has a lock in businesses, where it's often mandated as the only allowed desktop browser, but it has a less-dedicated -- some would say less-coerced -- base among consumers. On mobile, IE accounted for just 1.8% of usage.

Google's climb to the top spot in the U.S. followed its push into that place globally by almost a year: Adobe's data had Google's Chrome/Android passing Microsoft's IE in May 2013 worldwide. "Outside the U.S., Google's browser share has grown even more rapidly," an Adobe spokesman said in an email Friday.

Adobe's take on the desktop versus mobile contest was in line with other, earlier calculations by Net Applications, in that while IE's strength was its desktop browser, the rise in mobile browsing caused its overall share to drop six percentage points in the last year. Meanwhile, Chrome/Android and Safari benefited from their primary positions in mobile on Android and iOS, respectively, the two most-used mobile operating systems on the planet.

Chrome's 31% usage share on the desktop, for example, lagged behind IE's 43%, but Google's mobile browsers made up for that shortfall in spades. Safari's puny 10% on the desktop -- in fourth place in the U.S. -- was helped out of the cellar by Safari's 59% usage share on mobile.

Mozilla, Adobe said, was in the weakest position of the Big Four because of its lack of a viable mobile strategy. In the last two years, Mozilla has lost a steady drip of Firefox desktop users and been hit by the increasing importance of mobile browsing, with its total usage share falling from nearly 20% to its now sub-9%.

Although Net Applications' numbers are global and not U.S. specific -- the company does not publicly release the latter -- the trends shown by its data are similar to Adobe's.

But not identical.
By Net Applications' reckoning, Microsoft remained the top browser maker worldwide in May 2014 with a desktop + mobile user share of 48%, more than double that of runner-up Google and its 21%. Apple and Mozilla continued to battle for third place, with the former making strides in its move to pass the latter. In May, Firefox accounted for 13.8%, Safari for 13.4%. Safari cut the April gap between it and Firefox by more than half in May, and may become No. 3 as early as this month.

Firefox's decline could not come at a worse time. Mozilla's contract with Google for making the latter's search engine the default on Firefox comes up for renewal in November. According to Net Applications, Firefox had a combined desktop + mobile user share of 21.1% three years ago when it negotiated the current contract, which paid Mozilla approximately $300 million annually, nearly all of its revenue.

Going into this year's tête-à-tête with Google, Mozilla will be bargaining from a much weaker position, down 35% in total share since 2011.

Net Applications had mobile gaining more ground at the expense of desktop browsing in May. By the end of the month, mobile browsing had jumped to 18% of all browsing worldwide. At the current pace, mobile should reach the 20% milestone in October, and account for more than a quarter of all browsing by this time next year.

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