Microsoft: Outlook problems continue – Business customers also affected

Since last Thursday, there have been known problems with Microsoft's Exchange online systems, whereby access to mailboxes on Outlook.com or with the Outlook clients for desktops was disrupted. Microsoft initially only localized the problem for private customers. It is now clear that the problem is still ongoing and that business customers are also affected.

Microsoft has acknowledged this in the Microsoft365 Admin Center under the ticket number (IssueID) EX1113110. The ticket was opened on Friday night and the error description reads: "All users may be affected when trying to access their mailbox, using any connection method." The cause was a "multi-layered problem within Microsoft's processing infrastructure", which generated excessive requests to the backend components. This led to high resource consumption, which resulted in mailbox access problems for end users.

Status update on Monday of this week

This Monday's status update states that the fix for the underlying issue has "saturated 71 percent of the affected infrastructure" and service availability remains "healthy". As a precaution, engineers have intentionally slowed down the deployment to ensure there are no interruptions during peak business hours. "Based on our telemetry, we have not observed any further disruptions since our initial countermeasures. We will continue to closely monitor the service until the underlying issue is resolved," the Redmond-based company continues.

Although this sounds positive at first, it means that people are still unable to access their mailboxes – and not just private end customers, but also people who work professionally with Microsoft services. Colleagues at heise medien are also still affected.

While Microsoft still displayed the problems in the cloud status last week, it now writes that there are no disruptions. "All products are operational" it says on a green background.

(dmk)