Microsoft has issued a detailed mea culpa about the lengthy and ill-timed outage that affected its webmail services on Tuesday and Wednesday, an incident that undermines the company's push for its new Outlook.com as a better alternative to Gmail and Yahoo Mail.
"We do want to sincerely apologize to anyone that was unable to access their email during the interruption. Outages are something we take very seriously and invest a significant amount of our time and energy in doing our best to prevent," wrote Arthur de Haan, a Microsoft vice president, in a
blog post.
While outages affect all providers of consumer online services at one point or another, this one in particular lasted very long -- from Tuesday afternoon until Wednesday morning -- and happened while Microsoft is fanning the marketing flames for Outlook.com, the Hotmail replacement that the company is touting as a reinvention of webmail services in general.
