“I'm sure our competitors will highlight this outage,” he said.

But Ballmer is already formulating answers that he is for the most part holding close to his vest for now.

“I think we have good answers in terms of what we are doing for the development process and the service operations processes to make sure this does not occur [with Microsoft’s online services],” he said.

There, the stakes are much higher.

SharePoint Online, part of its (BPOS), has one million users. The majority of those customers use the service to store data online as it does not yet have full-feature parity with the enterprise version of SharePoint Server. In addition, Exchange Online is another data-intensive application within BPOS, a set of service run by Microsoft. Also, Microsoft next year plans to offer Office Web Applications, online versions of the popular productivity applications, that will feature SharePoint as their back-end data storage infrastructure.