Microsoft Exchange Online And Outlook Email Service Hit By Outage
After widespread complaints of blocked or sluggish email services, company says it has identified the problem and the ‘issue is resolved.’
Microsoft said Monday an outage that hit its Exchange Online and Outlook email services has been resolved.
The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant confirmed earlier today that it was probing an ongoing outage that hit Microsoft 365, prompting widespread complaints about down or sluggish email services via Outlook and Exchange Online.
The problems appear to have started late this morning and continued into the early afternoon ET, when Microsoft declared that it had identified the problem, made corrections and pronounced that the “issue is resolved.”
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But it took a while to identify and get a fix.
“We’re investigating an issue with users accessing or experiencing degraded functionality when using Exchange Online and outlook.com services,” Microsoft said in an initial tweet earlier in the day.
We're investigating an issue with users accessing or experiencing degraded functionality when using Exchange Online and https://t.co/gk7xXJQBz5 services. More details are available in your admin center under EX401976 and OL401977.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 18, 2022
As complaints about email access and other woes started to mount at Downdetector and other sites, Microsoft issued another tweet about the problems.
“ We suspect there may be unexpected network drops which are contributing to the degraded experience and are reviewing diagnostic logs to understand why,” the company said.
We suspect there may be unexpected network drops which are contributing to the degraded experience and are reviewing diagnostic logs to understand why. More details are available in your admin center under EX401976 and OL401977.
— Microsoft 365 Status (@MSFT365Status) July 18, 2022
Later again, Microsoft said it was zeroing in on what was causing the issues and pronouncing “the issue is resolved.”
“We identified a section of our network infrastructure that was performing below acceptable thresholds,” the company tweeted.
It then added: “We‘ve rerouted connections to alternate infrastructure and that confirmed the issue is resolved.”
In a statement released to CRN, a Microsoft spokesman confirmed: “We have resolved an issue that impacted some customers in the northeastern United States. Customers can visit their admin center for further details.”
The company did not answer an inquiry by CRN about how many users were impacted.
A Downdetector chart on the incident shows a late morning surge in online complaints about Exchange Online and Outlook, with reports peaking around 10:35 a.m. ET, before the number of complaints began to decline dramatically.
Today’s outage is the second in as many months for Microsoft 365.
Last month, customers worldwide had trouble accessing Microsoft Teams and Exchange Online.
The company later said the problem was caused by an “infrastructure power outage that led to traffic management servicing failovers in multiple regions,” as BleebingComputer.com reported at the time.