As reported by the Register this week, Office 365 has suffered another outage, resulting many customers unable to log in to their email.
Only a month previous, on December 18th 2015, an outage hit he UK and Europe mainly effecting customers using the Azure platform although there was some impact on its Office 365 service as well.
The current outage seems more serious however as it has been on going for around 7 days. The issue specifically relates to user accessing their emails via Exchange Online or any application that connects via IMAP.
Microsoft admitted that the impact will have hit a “large number of users”. What caused the issue? A Microsoft update that stopped the IMAP protocol that stopped data being loaded from Exchange Online databases. Not great!
Microsoft released the following statement, to address users concerns:
“As part of our efforts to improve service performance, an update was deployed to a subset of code which is responsible for obtaining the subscribed folder list. However, the update caused a code issue that prevented the list from being automatically loaded”.
Despite promises by Microsoft to fix the issue by the 23rd of January, as of the 25th it was still not resolved.
Microsoft, meanwhile, told users: “The deployment process is taking longer than initially expected due to a configuration issue.
“Engineers reconfigured the problematic portion of capacity and are continuing to monitor the deployment to ensure it propagates throughout the infrastructure in a timely manner. Customers will begin to experience service restoration as the deployment progresses.”
