Some of Microsoft's cloud customers are being affected by BlackBerry outage going on now. The outage is affecting BlackBerry customers in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Research in Motion has been investigating for about the last three hours. About an hour ago, Microsoft's MSOnline Twitter account sent out a short message warning that some if its Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) customers are being affected by RIM's outage.

BPOS supports BlackBerry devices. Microsoft has discontinued new sales of BPOS, in favor of Office 365, its next generation hosted cloud service which is a multi-tenant online version of Office, Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. In March, Microsoft announced that users of BPOS and Office 365 would get BlackBerry mobile BES support for free via a new BlackBerry cloud-based service rolled out by RIM in 2011. The BlackBerry service is hosted, licensed and supported by RIM. So when that goes down, BPOS/Office 365 users will be impacted.

While the price is certainly right, we can see how complicated and interconnected the cloud is becoming.