Microsoft services hit by outage

9 September 2011 Last updated at 09:08 GMT  Hotmail, Office 365 and Windows Live Skydrive were unavailable to millions of users Millions of Microsoft users were left unable to access some online services overnight because of a major service outage.

Hotmail, Office 365 and Skydrive were among the services affected.

Microsoft was still analysing the cause of the problem on Friday morning, but said it appeared to be related to the internet's DNS address system.

Such a major failure is likely to raise questions about the reliability of cloud computing versus local storage.

Especially embarrassing is the temporary loss of Office 365, the company's alternative to Google's suite of online apps.

The service also went offline briefly in mid-August, less than two months after it launched.

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