Outlook.com Outage Explained

Last week Microsoft suffered an almost three day service interruption effecting their Outlook.com email service. Outlook.com formally known at Hotmail is very popular and is an excellent free email platform. However a three day service problem is really unusual and not something any service provider wants to experience.

It may have taken three days, but Microsoft has officially resolved its Outlook.com outage -- and it has both explanations and long-term solutions for affected email users. Trouble began with the failure of a caching service for Exchange ActiveSync. The resulting deluge of reconnection attempts promptly overwhelmed company servers; a slow recovery was necessary to avoid another meltdown, Microsoft says. To prevent repeat incidents, the tech giant is both upgrading its network capacity and implementing a more elegant error handling system. While the fixes likely come too late for some users, they suggest that Microsoft has learned a hard lesson about the fragility of online services.