If you’ve been having trouble with Outlook.com or SkyDrive over the last few days, you’ll be glad to hear the problem is now fixed.
Microsoft announced this morning that it’s fixed a three day outage that was affecting some users of Outlook.com and SkyDrive.
The problem was with a caching service that uses Exchange ActiveSync to communicate with devices such as smartphones. The error meant that some phones were continuously trying to connect to Microsoft’s service and failing. The resulting flood of traffic affected Microsoft’s Live servers. Some customers couldn’t connect to Outlook.com, while others had difficulties sharing SkyDrive files in email.
Microsoft says it fixed the problem by temporarily blocking ActiveSync, but the system had to work through a backlog before the issue was fully resolved.
We all know how important email is for day to day use, and it’s great to hear that Microsoft understands that too: it says it’s learned from the incident and will change the way error handling is managed to avoid people being without such an essential service for days.