I know this because a partner event was cancelled this morning because of technical difficulties.

According to the email header sent to partners, the event had to be rescheduled “due to LM issues.”

Ironically, the event was for partners who wanted to hear more about Microsoft Office 365, another Microsoft-hosted service. 

The downtime is not exactly unprecedented. In August, Microsoft fessed up to a couple serious Business Productivity Online Services  (BPOS) outages that put the company afoul of its Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

A network upgrade sparked a “2-hour period of intermittent access for BPOS organizations served from North America,” on August 23, wrote Microsoft’s Morgan Cole in his blog. Then, other issues cropped up on September 3 and 7 when “BPOS customers experienced brief periods of service degradation.”

For the August 23 issue, Microsoft proactively credited affected customers, according to an answer to a customer question posted to the blog.

These snafus are not what Microsoft needs as it tries to paint itself as the responsible, business-focused alternative to Google Apps etc.

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