Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Business Productivity Online Suite customers received an apology from the company for service outages that took place in August and September. The BPOS offerings include email, web conferencing and SharePoint.

An August 23 outage stemmed from Microsoft's efforts to upgrade its network infrastructure, Morgan Cole, a director with the company's Online Services team, said in a post on the company's blog. Outages on Sept. 3 and Sept. 7 were the result of "another underlying issue," he wrote.

"I wanted to write here to apologize to you, our customers, for any inconvenience these issues may have caused," Cole wrote. "We know how important these services are to the daily operation of your business, and we take our responsibility as your partner and service provider very seriously."

The incidents are raising concern among some businesses that have migrated to the hosted software services, writes Mary Jo Foley in a post at ZDNet. There are worries that the service interruptions reduce their credibility among their own customers. Some are wondering whether Microsoft will compensate customers for the outages.

Microsoft has tried to tout its appeal to business users as an experienced enterprise services provider, contrasting itself with more consumer-oriented companies, such as Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), notes Nancy Gohring in an article at ITWorld. In light of the service interruptions over the past few weeks, however, some business customers have complained that they are being left in the dark too much during outages.

For more:
- see Morgan Cole's post at Microsoft blog
- see Mary Jo Foley's post at ZDNet
- seee Nancy Gohring's post at ITWorld

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