Refresh
Welcome to our coverage of this outage: Not long ago, we saw big spikes in reporting on outage tracker DownDetector, with Microsoft Outlook affected.
As you can see, that’s a big increase in outage reports in DownDetector for Microsoft Outlook…
The official Azure status page confirmed that there is an issue and it is being investigated.
Users “may experience intermittent problems signing in to Outlook.com,” the company says, in addition to possibly seeing “experience intermittent sign-in failures, including “too many requests” errors or unexpected logouts. Additionally, affected users may include, but are not limited to, iOS users.”
We have to say that Microsoft’s latest update doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.
“We continue to investigate the unexpected increase in error rates affecting two separate error scenarios to identify any potential root causes that may be responsible for this. Additionally, we are closely monitoring service telemetry to uncover other potential actions or mitigation steps.”
While that continues, outage reports continue to rise on DownDetector, although things are stabilizing slightly.
Microsoft has updated its slightly vague and helpless message from before, with a post that sounds a little more confident.
“We are seeing specific errors related to failures in authentication keys,” he said. “We are working to determine the underlying cause to determine our next mitigation steps.”
Interestingly, the outage appears to be limited only to Microsoft Outlook, suggesting that it is an issue directly related to the email program.
It’s been 40 minutes since a Microsoft update; Although outage reports appear to be stabilizing, it is still quite a while.
We finally received an update from Microsoft; It looks like this might be a longer-lasting gremlin than expected…
Things have calmed down again: we’re still seeing a fair amount of outage reports on DownDetector, but nothing from Microsoft yet.
Finally, we may have the end in sight, as confirmed by a new update to the health status page of Microsoft’s service.
“We are testing a rollback of this change to determine if this fixes the impact. In parallel, we continue to investigate unusual error patterns that were previously observed.”
So let’s cross our fingers: this might fix it!
Reports also seem to be decreasing about DownDetector, so it could be bad news for anyone who wants to avoid emails for a little longer.
Well, that’s a change for the books: Microsoft admitted that its previous solution didn’t work as expected.
Progress! Finally, Microsoft believes it may have found the problem, after several hours of fighting.
“We have completed a rollback of this configuration change. We are now carefully monitoring the environment to determine if it worked as intended or if additional steps are required for full resolution of the incident.”
So things may be almost back to normal!
Microsoft thinks it has fixed the problem!
iOS users were particularly affected, he adds, providing a list of steps for Apple device users to gain access once again:
-Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
-Scroll down and tap Mail.
-Select Accounts in Mail settings.
-Tap the email account for which you need to re-enter the password.
-Tap Account Settings or directly on the Password field (depending on your iOS version).
-Enter the updated or correct password in the Password field.
-Tap Done to save your changes.
-Open the Mail app to confirm that the account is syncing correctly and emails are being sent/received.
Good luck!
And with that, we’re seeing outage reports drop on DownDetector, so that should (hopefully) be the end of that.
