February 8, 2023
Users reported problems sending, receiving, or searching email through Outlook.com, according to outage tracker DownDetector. Some users also report being unable to connect to Outlook.com, receiving 500 Errors when attempting to log in, or having their entire accounts wiped and not being able to access their emails after connecting.
The reports began arriving around 4 a.m. UTC, peaking between 8 and 9 a.m. as Europeans arrived at their desks. Microsoft began performing targeted restarts on portions of the infrastructure that had been impacted by a recent change right away.
Microsoft confirmed the outage on its service health website, saying: “We’re applying targeted mitigations to a subset of affected infrastructure and validating that it has mitigated impact. We’re also making traffic optimization efforts to alleviate user impact and expedite recovery.”
In an update to its service health site, Microsoft stated that the current Outlook outage also affects additional functionality, such as the calendar used by other services such as the Microsoft Teams communication platform.
Microsoft later reported that a “full restoration” of its Outlook service was nearly complete by mid-morning Tuesday, following a widespread outage that halted email and disrupted Teams and other products for several hours overnight.
The company stated that it had identified a recent change that may have caused problems with Outlook.com but provided no further details. However, in a post-incident report, it revealed that it was caused by a router IP address change, which caused packet forwarding issues between all routers in its Wide Area Network (WAN).
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.
