Outlook outages: Microsoft forgets Germany

Since last Thursday, there have been disruptions in accessing Outlook.com mailboxes and Outlook clients. Initially, only private customers appeared to be affected, but Microsoft quickly had to admit that business customers were also affected. However, when fixing the cause, Microsoft apparently simply forgot about the infrastructure in Germany. Now, however, mailboxes on Exchange Online systems should be accessible again without any problems in Germany.

The history of the ticket with IssueID EX1113110 in Microsoft's 365 Admin Center shows that Microsoft was apparently surprised by the ongoing error reports from Germany on Monday of this week and then “found a piece of infrastructure that was overlooked when distributing the initial countermeasures.” The engineers created a new fix and applied it to the overlooked infrastructure later on Monday.

Increased database capacity

In further status updates, the technicians discuss that they have increased database capacities, for example, and that the availability of the infrastructure in Germany has visibly improved as a result. On Tuesday night, the team completed monitoring the changes, as the measures had now been successful. Users of Outlook with Microsoft's Online Exchange servers, such as those with a Microsoft 365 subscription, should no longer experience any disruptions.

On Monday of this week, impacted users in Germany were still reporting issues accessing email inboxes in Microsoft's cloud structures. Colleagues at heise publishing were also affected. It also became clear that it was not only private users who were facing the issues, as Microsoft initially stated, but also business customers with enterprise licenses.

(dmk)