Microsoft Office 365 Downtime Shows Communication Lacking

Microsoft (MSFT) may need to do some work to catch up to competitors in the cloud-based office productivity service space. Its Office 365 offering suffered prolonged outages earlier this week, and both customers and partners were left partially in the dark, having no way to be informed of outages except through a login-only portal.

It's not impossible to find out about outages, of course. Microsoft does provide status updates using Office 365 Service Health Dashboard, but it's only accessible to partners and customers—and even then, only to those that log into their accounts and check the dashboard. When there are definite outages, such as the Lync outage on Monday and the Exchange Online outage on Tuesday, Microsoft does eventually confirm on Twitter, as well.

But contrast that with the more transparent and publicly available service health information provided top cloud competitors such as Google (GOOG) and Amazon Web Services (AWS). Both Google and AWS provide the information a public webpage—a feature that Microsoft Office 365 is still lacking.

As noted in a statement to CRN, Microsoft said it restricts access to such valuable information "to ensure that companies own the messaging for their internal users." Microsoft claims customers prefer it this way. But that seems doubtful considering the backlash from partners CRN reported on.

It's nothing new. Microsoft has struggled with making its partners happy since the launch of Office 365, and at times it seems as though the company has purposefully gone against partner wishes. This appears to be an example of that odd behavior.

Hiding cloud health status information behind a login portal can make it difficult for both customers and partners to rapidly deal with service issues, including unexpected downtime. Outages, particularly with business-critical applications such as Office 365, are sadly inevitable, but transparency seems the way to go—and certainly the way Microsoft's biggest competitors are going.

Considering the popularity of Office products over the years, it seems doubtful such behavior is going to put Microsoft truly to task, but it could be a deciding factor in future major cloud business deals.