Microsoft has resolved a problem that affected SkyDrive Wednesday, but technical issues with Outlook.com have proven harder to fix.
The glitches surfaced at around 10 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday and the SkyDrive problem was declared fixed at around 2 p.m.
While access to affected Outlook.com accounts had been restored, Microsoft was still working to fix an issue affecting syncing of emails with mobile devices.
“We are working to restore full mobile access as quickly as possible,” a spokesman for Microsoft said via email early Wednesday evening.
By 8:30 p.m., the Live Status page, an availability dashboard for Microsoft consumer cloud services, showed the issue as still unresolved.
A related problem with the People contacts application was also fixed at some point in the afternoon. It had caused address book changes not to be properly delivered to Hotmail, causing some customers to have out-of-date contacts on Outlook.com.
The Microsoft spokesman said earlier in the day that the problem affected a small number of customers, but the company didn’t give a specific number.
Last week, Microsoft trumpeted that it had exceeded 99.9 percent uptime in each of the past four quarters for its Office 365 cloud suite, which businesses use for email, collaboration and communication.
Microsoft also said last week that it will report uptime stats for the Business, Government and Education editions of Office 365 at the end of every quarter from now on. Until now, only Office 365 customers have had access to that type of availability information.
The Office 365 components measured for uptime are Exchange, SharePoint, Lync and Office Web Apps. Some industry analysts welcomed the move toward more transparency, but said at the time that Microsoft should go further and provide more granular details, such as uptime by geography and by application, and ideally even set up a public status page like the Live Status page it has for consumer cloud applications.
