Cause and extent of the outage not released.

Some North American Office 365 customers are without Lync service this afternoon due to an unexplained outage that started about 7a.m., Eastern time.

Practical advice for you to take full advantage of the benefits of APM and keep your IT environment

The outage has been acknowledged by the Microsoft Office Twitter account, which had this to say: “We realize some Lync users in North America are experiencing issues, we are working to resolve.”

A Microsoft spokesperson issued the following statement: “Some users in North America are experiencing issues with Lync Online due to network routing infrastructure issues. In response, engineers have routed a portion of network traffic to an alternate datacenter which has restored service for some of our customers. We are committed to fixing this issue as quickly as possible and expect the service to be restored for all customers soon. Customers can get the latest Lync Online status through the admin Service Health Dashboard.”

It’s a black eye just as Lync is making dramatic gains against the major IP PBX vendors in North America.

Data released at the Enterprise Connect conference this year indicates Lync ranks 11th worldwide among IP PBX vendors, but comes in No.3 in North America among businesses with more than 100 phone extensions.

It’s a distant third, but given that the company didn’t register on a survey of corporate PBX customers three years ago, the status is impressive, says Peter Hale, principal analyst with MZA, who presented the results.

“It’s become a very significant player in a very short period of time.” says Jerry Caron, an analyst with Current Analysis who was familiar with the survey results.

Cisco sold 44 percent of the phone extensions with Avaya pulling down 20 percent. Microsoft landed 13 percent, according to the survey.

Best Microsoft MCTS Certification, Microsoft MCITP Training at certkingdom.com