Microsoft Office 365 Outage Felt by US Customers

Microsoft Office 365

Users have been complaining that the Microsoft Office 365 email has not been working well on Twitter. Users complained that they were experiencing substantial delays with the email service across the country.

Some of the users on Twitter complained that they could not send or receive emails for more than six hours. The outage was experienced on June 30. One of the sites which help with detecting when there are problems with the network, DownDetector.com, noted a spike in the reported issues aligned with the Office 365 suite of services such as Exchange, Outlook, and the server connections were said to have begun faulting at 10:30 am ET on June 30. Efforts to get to Microsoft at the time went unanswered.

One Twitter user, Ryan Hoffman, claimed that his whole company had had issues with the Microsoft service since 11:30 am ET. He gave details on how they had been trying to solve the issue for hours but all to no avail.

One Microsoft spokesperson who finally talked to reporters about the problem said that the company was working on restoring the service and acknowledged that some users were failing to send and receive emails using the Office Outlook service. Service degradation is thought to have started after 10:30 am ET because one of the affected users, Michael LaMontagne said that he had seen his Exchange Online status dashboard then.

Microsoft put out a status message for its customers which noted that a part of the infrastructure which is responsible for the processing and the Exchange Online Protection message filtering had become degraded. This degradation led to the message transport delays. The company also wrote that only a subset of users on the service had been affected by the problem, and added they were restarting the services so that they could fix the problem and bring it back to a healthy state for all customers affected.

NB: An update was made concerning the issue and seemed like Microsoft fixed the problem. However, there has been a rise in complaints from users outside of the US complaining that they are now also experiencing the same problem. There has been a queue from the outbound and inbound sources. Microsoft says they have begun measures to fix the problem, so another update is expected.