Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) had a tough day Wednesday when one of its data centers conked out, knocking out the Office 365 Exchange servers and leaving users without email for about three hours.

Around the same time, its CRM Online system went offline. The good news, writes Woody Leonhard in a post at InfoWorld, is that Lync and SharePoint weren't disrupted.

Even better, Microsoft came clean about the problems and kept users fairly well informed.

Leonhard offers a play-by-play recap of the outage and how Microsoft responded. About a half hour into the disruption, there was an acknowledgement from Redmond. Less than an hour later, the company disclosed the extent of the damage. When service was restored, Microsoft's Service Health Dashboard announced it.

Ironically, users following @Office365 on Twitter were behind the eight ball because it took more than an hour for the news of the disruption to be posted there, Leonhard writes. 

While Microsoft's response was not exactly lightening fast ("a nationwide email outage certainly deserves something better than a 30-minute partial notification," he writes), the company was more responsive than in past outages. The Service Health dashboard worked for the most part.

"Compared to Microsoft's response to BPOS outages just three months ago, we're witnessing some big-time improvements," he wrote. "If Microsoft can't keep its systems working, at least it can notify customers when there are problems, and keep them up-to-date on the solutions. This time--I'm tempted to say for the first time--Microsoft's done a pretty good job of it."

For more:
- see Woody Leonhard's post at InfoWorld

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