If at any point you had issues using your Outlook email, you weren’t the only one. And no, it wasn’t your network provider.
As at 7 am Thursday, Microsoft experienced a worldwide downtime.
The downtime affected both Outlook on desktop and mobile, Outlook on the web and Outlook.com.
Users reported getting a notification saying “something went wrong” with an unhappy face.
At almost the same time, reports recorded nearly 2000 Outlook users expressing concern.
Most of the complaints came from users in Europe and the UK, with US users hardly noticing.
A similar outage initially occurred on Monday, the 28th of September and some 48 hours after, it happened again.
The initial outage saw Microsoft Outlook, Teams and Office 365 users majorly affected.
And for six hours, the failure continued also affecting Dynamics 365.
In response, the software giant had to pull back changes around verification for Microsoft and Azure Services.
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As usual, a good number of users took to their Twitter accounts to express their frustration.
Most of the complaints on Twitter came from workers trying to gain access to their mails.
Worse of all, the problem came at a time when a lot of people are working remotely.
This left users unable to talk to their companies or attend to important work.
Initial reports from Microsoft showed that the latest downtime hit only users in India.
But later, it was confirmed that it was a global problem that went on for 4 hours.
Outlook users found it impossible to use their mails and the website loaded all through the downtime.
Microsoft Office Service also stated that users of the Outlook website, Outlook.com, might find it hard to use their mails.
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What could have happened?
If you have wondered what could have happened, we’re with you. Here’s what we can tell you:
The company said it has begun looking into the cause of the issue to identify its cause.
However, there was no sign to help determine when Microsoft will take care of it.
Microsoft further added that it has started gathering data from the hit systems to help the investigation.
According to Microsoft, Monday’s downtime was a result of a service interruption.
The interruption occurred while an authentication operation was being carried out.
Microsoft further clarified that the outage was not an indication of any malicious activity.
Microsoft also attributed today’s downtime to a configuration change that route users request.
According to the software company, they are monitoring the recovery of the service.
Although reasons for the outages have surfaced, Microsoft didn’t clearly spell out a root cause.
At the end of the day, an actual reason for two downtimes in one week might never come out.
If it does, we’ll keep you posted.
In the meantime, we’d like to hear from you.
Did you experience the outage? Let us know in the comments section.
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