Microsoft's (NASDAQ: MSFT) Office 365 cloud service was hit with an outage on Wednesday, with the problem originating from one of Microsoft's North American data centers.

The downtime apparently also prevented service requests from getting through, further frustrating users and resulting in some complaining on the Office 365 community site about the lack of a phone number to call.

Office 365 was launched at the end of June and consists of online services such as cloud-based Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office.

Microsoft blamed the problem on a networking issue and says it started restoring services Wednesday afternoon. It's not clear whether the downtime has been completely resolved at this point, since Microsoft does not have an equivalent to Amazon's (NASDAQ: AMZN) publicly-accessible Service Health Dashboard.

Details of service availability can be individually viewed by administrators of Office 365--but of course, you would have known by now if your company was affected. The Service Health dashboard can be accessed from the Admin option on the top bar -> Support -> Service Health. At the time of writing, an investigation is still underway as to the exact cause of the outage.

So does cloud computing really afford greater reliability or result in greater downtime? Feel free to post your opinion in the comments section below. In the meantime, I have some thoughts on this topic in today's editorial.

For more:
- check out this article at Computerworld
- check out this article at ZDNet

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