Microsoft released some info about the three-hour outage that affected North American Office 365 and SkyDrive customers two days ago, blocking off access to their email and calendar services. The software giant put the blame on  “a networking interruption” in one of its datacenters, though there’s still no word about the Dynamics CRM outage that happened on the same day for some reason.

CNET’S Mary Foley cited a source who said the issues had to do with malfunctioning Cisco gear, something Microsoft did not confirm so far. Either way though, the company was swift to send out an email informing customers of a 25 percent price cut on their subscription fees this month.

Here’s a part of that message:

“We understand that any disruption in service may result in a disruption to your business. As a gesture of our commitment to ensuring the highest quality service experience Microsoft is proactively providing your organization a credit equal to 25% of your monthly invoice. The credit will appear on a future invoice, and you do not need to contact Microsoft to receive this credit.”

Microsoft had several other cloud developments lately.  Windows 8 chief developer Steven Sinofsky revealed yesterday that there’s going to be a Win8 app store, similar to the Mac App Store Apple implemented this year. Details are scarce, but  it’s likely that Microsoft will also be going after the enterprise with the marketplace or some variation of it.

The day before news broke of this app store, a leaked Youtube site showcased what looked like a new Xbox dashboard that included Skype, among other things.  Considering Microsoft’s acquisition of the VoIP company, it was just a matter of time until it would integrate the software into the console, but now we got a glimpse of what’s coming.  The video was later removed, something that some called a confirmation it was indeed legitimate.