If you had that rumored Office app on your iPad, it would have been down today

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Office 365 email went down for some people for several hours today, according to reports online and via Twitter. Service was eventually restored around 3:45 pm Pacific Time, according to Microsoft. 

On the heels of reports that Microsoft plans to launch an Office app for iOS and Android that would be tied to Office 365, this outage highlights the problems mobile users will face if they use those apps.

Last week, reports suggested that Microsoft plans to release Office apps for iOS and Android early next year and that anyone could use the apps to view documents but they would have to sign in with their Office 365 IDs to edit docs.

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In that case, during an outage like today’s, people wouldn’t be able to edit their Word docs, Powerpoint slides or Excel spreadsheets from their iPads or Android phones.

People who download the app, once it’s available, and then suffer through an outage or two that prevents them from working on documents will have one more reason to switch back to Quickoffice or the many other apps that already let them view and edit Office documents, in many cases for free.

Microsoft didn’t reply to questions about what time the outage started or how widespread it was.

Microsoft’s Office 365 community page has several pages of people complaining about the outage. The company posted a message there under the heading "Issues in the Americas" saying: “We are investigating reports of a potential issue in North America. Updates will be posted to Service Health Dashboard and to this forum thread.

Here's Microsoft's official statement on the outage:

On Tuesday, Nov. 13, some customers served from our North America data centers experienced intermittent access to e-mail services. The issue was resolved and the service is now functioning normally. During the duration of the issue, customers were updated regularly via our normal communication channels.  We sincerely apologize to our customers for any inconvenience this incident may have caused them.

Nancy Gohring is a freelance journalist who has been writing about mobile networks, cloud computing and consumer electronics for more than a decade. Read Nancy's bio