Microsoft has apologised for another Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) outage that left customers across the pond struggling to access email.

Only last month, the software firm was forced to say sorry after its troubled online service crashed for three hours, which followed problems in May.

Microsoft confirmed the problem in a statement sent to The Reg: "On 19 July beginning at approximately 8:30 am Pacific Daylight Time (PDT), some BPOS customers in North America began experiencing intermittent access to email".

The issue was resolved more than two hours later, it added, "and the service is now functioning normally. We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience this incident may have caused some of our customers."

The BPOS health dashboard used to identify gremlins was green, indicating no problems, but Outlook could not connect to a server.

"What a totally useless tool," one user complained on a Microsoft forum.

Some customers were counting down the days to the launch of Office 365, the successor to BPOS launched last week, following the numerous instances of downtime.

A customer on the forum branded the crash as "troubling going forward" and said that he was migrating BPOS clients to Office 365 "but not if this continues. How can anyone allow email downtime?"

Anyone pinning their hopes on an infallible Office 365 should note Microsoft's refreshingly honest – for an IT vendor – comments that the new online system will have outages, with tiered discounts in place for downtime. ®