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Microsoft Outlook Service Down After Bad Software Update
Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online and the Outlook on the Web App, were disrupted on Monday, June 5 due to a problematic Microsoft service update, per a "Microsoft 365 Status" Twitter post series.
The problems also were noted in this Reddit thread. The issues, extent of the problems, and whether or not they have been resolved, all were not clear at press time.
Beyond the publicly available Microsoft Twitter posts, which offered little information, Microsoft only described the incident as "MO572252" in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center portal, which only gets seen by the IT pros managing the account. The MO572252 Message Center announcement combines two previously issued incident notices, which were labeled "MO571683" and "EX571516."
Microsoft had reverted the supposedly problematic update and reported seeing a "service improvement." However, the problems apparently happened again on June 5. Here's how the team expressed that notion:
We've determined that impact associated with MO571683 and EX571516 has reoccurred and are investigating the cause. We'll be providing updates related to this event under MO572252 in the admin center.
The downtime interval was not too clear per the Downdetector.com site, which uses a crowd-sourcing approach to detect service issues. It showed a spike in complaints at about 7:00 a.m. (likely Eastern Time), with 85 percent attributing the problems to Outlook. Microsoft's reports, though, suggested that Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business services were affected, too.
Exoprise, a services-monitoring company that uses sensors to detect outages, described the Outlook service issues as occurring at around 10:00 a.m. or 10:22 a.m. on Monday "in various locations." Its sensors detected the disruption two hours before Microsoft's first report.
Exoprise's data indicated that "the outage was affecting everyone" and it affected "most Microsoft Office 365 services." An Exoprise crowd-sourcing service also suggested that the outages were "felt across a lot of infrastructure."
Microsoft's last Twitter report was time stamped at 1:15 p.m. on June 5, which is when it reported a reoccurrence of the problems. No resolution was described. The Outlook service problems seem to have lasted about three hours, at least.
About the Author
Kurt Mackie is senior news producer for 1105 Media's Converge360 group.