Customers of data center services provider Terremark's public cloud experienced problems accessing their virtual resources for about seven hours on Thursday. Outage of the company's vCloud Express service was attributed to connectivity losses, causing slow access for customers and at times interrupting access altogether, according to a cloud performance monitoring service.

The issue began around noon EDT on Mar. 17 and continued through the day, until about 7 p.m., reported Apparent Networks, a company that monitors performance of cloud service providers. "There were intermittent periods of connectivity with high data packet loss between those times, and the number of connectivity loss events and duration varied slightly by location," Apparent wrote in its description of the outage.

"During that time, access to systems in the Miami data center was severely degraded and often unavailable. Businesses utilizing Terremark's vCloud Express services from this datacenter were affected."

Replying to a customer complaint on Terremark's vCloud Express support forum, the company's representatives confirmed that there was an ongoing packet-loss issue between servers in Miami. In an update post on the same forum, a Terremark staff member wrote on Friday morning that the "slowness has begun to subside."