Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Customers Find New Resource, Outlet for Complaints on Outages

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Service Blog on August 9 to provide a clear and consistent place for our customers and partners to look for updates specifically about service health issues in CRM Online Service. And for better or worse, the blog has had plenty to write about over the last month as different outages have impacted various parts of the world.

To say that users were less than happy with the most recent North American Microsoft Dynamics CRM outage, which took out the CRM organizations of "a large percentage of North American customers", would be reasonable.  On September 5 at 2:50 p.m. PDT, Emanueal Mulatu, Microsoft's Program Manager II Information Technology, explained that Microsoft was investigating the outage.

Then at 3:35 p.m., Mulatu said "mitigation steps are still in progress. Please expect an update within the hour. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this is causing." Finally, at 4:26 p.m. CRM Online was back, well, online.

But users were not impressed, and the comments of the service blog turn out to be a perfect place for a frustrated customer to sound off on the unfortunately timed outage during work hours and its potential impact on sales and revenue.  One comment asked whether Microsoft was planning to remunerate CRM online subscribers for the downtime, but there was no public response.

As with earlier outages, a post-incident report (PIR) will be offered up within five days, according to Mulatu.

Problems with CRM Online seem ...