Microsoft has apologized for an outage with Outlook.com that has dragged on for about three days.
It kept some people from accessing their email, People app and SkyDrive cloud storage.
While Microsoft's apology letter says that service is now restored, according to Microsoft's status dashboard, everything still isn't hunky dory. As we write this, the calendar app is still down for some people.
The outage gives Microsoft a black eye considering it's Scroogled ad campaign is trying to scare people away from Gmail and towards Outlook.com.
And the fact that Microsoft was forced to apologize for an Outlook.com outage just a few months ago, in March.
And the fact that Microsoft has now tightly integrated Windows Phone and Windows 8 with some of these services.
On top of that, Microsoft just launched a big promotion to prove to business customers that the business version of its cloud, Office 365, is reliable and won't go down much.
Compare this with Google's problems on Friday. When Google suffered an almost unprecedented outage, crashing all services including search, it took some 40% of Internet traffic with it, by some accounts. That shows how frighteningly reliant the Internet is on Google, but it also shows how rare it is for Google to falter in a big way. The downtime lasted all of a couple of minutes.
