Microsoft Office 365 was unavailable for five hours to users in North and South America on Tuesday.

The outage was not the first issue for those same users this month. On Thursday, users saw prolonged mail flow delays, according to a post on the Office 365 blog Tuesday.

The separate incidents accounted for 13 hours total of service issues for emails users. As many web hosts look to compete with Microsoft

Office365 on their hosted email offering, incidents like these could push these users to seek out a web host for their email hosting needs.

On Wednesday, Rackspace launched new SharePoint email professional services that could do just that. The services focus on customization, and offer application-level and administrative support, including monitoring. The services also include a 100 percent power and network service level agreement.

Rajesh Jha, who leads the engineering organization at Microsoft responsible for Office 365, says Microsoft will provide more information on

how its SLA was impacted by the service issues, as well as an official post mortem.

The most recent issue “resulted from a combination of issues related to maintenance, network element failures, and increased load on the

service,” according to Jha.

The Office 365 team was performing non-impacting network maintenance on Tuesday morning by shifting some load out of the data centers

under maintenance.

“Significant capacity increase has already been well underway, but we are also adding automated handling on these gray failures to speed

recovery time.  Across the organization, we are executing a full review of our processes to proactively identify further actions needed to avoid

these situations.”

“As I’ve said before,all of us in the Office 365 team and at Microsoft appreciate the serious responsibility we have as a service provider to you,and we know that any issue with the service is a disruption to your business–that’s not acceptable.I want to assure you that we are investing

the time and resources required to ensure we are living up to your–and our own–expectations for a quality service experience every day,”Jha

says.

Recently,Dell partnered with Parallels to launch its own hosted Microsoft Office 365 service,and Sprint partnered with Parallels to launch hosted Microsoft Office 365 as well.