Microsoft BPOS Outage Gets Little Attention

When it comes to Microsoft’s BPOS service, we often hear grumblings from the user community about downtime.  Yet, there is little or no press coverage.  Beyond the frequency of scheduled maintenance windows required for patches and security updates, we hear complaints about performance-related outages and emergency maintenance windows for fixes and updates to scheduled patches.

On Monday, August 23rd, Reuters reported that Microsoft’s US Data Centers experiences an outage lasting more than 2 hours … well beyond the 99.9% SLA touted by Microsoft for the BPOS and other hosted services.

That last Gmail outage made headlines on CNN and USA Today.   The Microsoft BPOS outage received relatively little coverage beyond a core set of reports in the IT press.  Maybe there is a difference in expectations?