Microsoft's SkyDrive accidently freezes out Opera users

The software giant is working quickly to fix a bug that rendered the cloud storage service useless on Opera's Web browser.

Dara Kerr Former senior reporter

Dara Kerr was a senior reporter for CNET covering the on-demand economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado, went to school in New York City and can never remember how to pronounce gif.

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Dara Kerr

Nov. 12, 2012 5:27 p.m. PT

After a SkyDrive debacle over the weekend, which caused Opera users to be blocked from the cloud storage service, Microsoft has said it's working quickly to fix the problem.

The problem began when Opera, which is a Web browser, received a bug report showing that Microsoft's cloud storage service froze out all users when it was being loaded. Instead of being able to see their saved files and photos, users could only see millions of characters of code.

After some poking around, Opera's Hallvord Steen realized that the problem was "some strange bug in the Microsoft backend [that] sends a load of unexpected NULL characters -- more than 2 million of them right in the middle of the source code," he wrote in an Opera blog post.

Microsoft has recognized the problem, and a spokesperson told CNET that "SkyDrive engineers have identified a temporary optimization issue that has prevented customers from viewing SkyDrive on Opera in the past couple days. A fix will be released shortly."

The bug apparently has only affected users on Opera; other browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome don't seem to be have the same SkyDrive issue. Steen admitted that part of the problem was caused by Opera, which "gets way more confused by the unexpected NULL characters than Firefox does."