Outlook out in North America, Microsoft scrambles for a fix • The Register

Microsoft confirmed a major email service outage across North America that is stopping inboxes from filling up and may be hitting other apps when logging in.

“We’re investigating an issue affecting a portion of infrastructure in North America, where users may be unable to access their mailbox via any Exchange Online connection method,” it stated in a notice at 0936 in its home time zone (1636 UTC for the rest of customers.)

The usual suspects are out, but no word on a fix yet – Click to enlarge

The problem is more than just the standard stutter – two hours later, Microsoft was still baffled. Microsoft has been digging through its data banks without success and blocked inboxes and unstable traffic persist. There have been unconfirmed reports of OneDrive being affected too.

“We’re continuing to evaluate service telemetry for potential system irregularities contributing to impact, and in parallel we’re applying some changes to optimize affected mailbox infrastructure,” it added two hours later.

Redmond has said it’ll update us as new information comes in, but Downdetector reports a big surge of problems for Outlook online and Microsoft 365 users starting around four hours after Microsoft said there are issues with its code. On its public support page, it was reporting “Service degradation on Microsoft consumer products.”

Things have been a bit rocky for Microsoft of late, and Outlook in particular. In July, users of the service got an 11-hour break from email when the app wasn’t “performing as efficiently as expected.” That was a software fix that went wrong, which looks very likely in this case too.

It’s in the clear on Azure problems in the Middle East; however, that’s looking like a cable break on land or sea.

For those enjoying the blissful release of freedom from Teams invitations, emails that slipped past the spam filter, and unwelcome updates then don’t get too comfortable. Microsoft usually fixes serious outages quickly.

Microsoft said its incremental changes have improved service, and it’s monitoring to ensure those optimizations are applied across all affected infrastructure. We’ll update as more information comes in. ®