Following a lengthy outage to Outlook and Hotmail last week, Microsoft has responded, blaming an overheated data center as the problem.

After initially offering no explanation to the service interruption, which lasted over 16 hours, the software company took to it's official blog to right the record straight.

"On the afternoon of the 12th, in one physical region of one of our datacenters, we performed our regular process of updating the firmware on a core part of our physical plant," says Arthur de Haan, vice president, Windows Services.

"This is an update that had been done successfully previously, but failed in this specific instance in an unexpected way.

"This failure resulted in a rapid and substantial temperature spike in the datacenter.

"This spike was significant enough before it was mitigated that it caused our safeguards to come in to place for a large number of servers in this part of the datacenter."

Before diving into the details however, Haan did offer a "sincere apology" to anyone unable to access their email during the interruption.

Haan also stressed that the outage was not felt across the board, with "the vast majority of people using our services have had a smooth experience during this time and are enjoying the new Outlook.com experience."

The interruption also affected a small part of the SkyDrive service, with Microsoft now offering real time information relating specifically to any service issues.

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