Microsoft users could not access online services, including Hotmail, Office 365 and Skydrive, for hours because of a major service failure.

This is the second major outage of the company’s services after last month’s disruption of Office 365 temporarily.

Microsoft has said that the problem was related to the internet’s DNS address system and has now been fixed.

The company apologised for the outage in a blog saying, "We have completed propagating our DNS configuration changes around the world, and have restored service for most customers. Depending on your location you may still experience issues over the next 30 minutes as the changes make their way through the network. Thank you for your patience as we have worked to address these issues."

Google Docs was also unavailable for sometime, according to the BBC.

Microsoft launched its cloud-based service for businesses Office 365 suite on 28 June as the company’s alternative to Google’s online apps.

Last month, Microsoft’s cloud services, including Office 365, customer relationship management (CRM) suite, Dynamics CRM, experienced their first major outage for users in the US.

According to Microsoft service-level agreement, the company guarantees a 99.9% level of uptime.

The company says that if it fails to reach 99.9% uptime, users are eligible for a minimum of 25% service credit.