14 DAY TRIAL // Outlook.com access has been fully restored, so all users across the world are supposed to be able to get to their inboxes without experiencing any other issue.
Microsoft has recently issued an apology for all consumers who couldn’t send and receive messages for almost three days, while also providing a few more details on what has caused the downtime.
The company posted a message on its service status page to describe the problems, explaining that it was all just a glitch caused by a caching service.
Here’s the full message posted by Microsoft on the recent Outlook.com outage:
“This incident was a result of a failure in a caching service that interfaces with devices using Exchange ActiveSync, including most smart phones. The failure caused these devices to receive an error and continuously try to connect to our service.
This resulted in a flood of traffic that our services did not handle properly, with the effect that some customers were unable to access their Outlook.com email and unable to share their SkyDrive files via email.
In order to stabilize the overall email service, we temporarily blocked access via Exchange ActiveSync. This allowed us to restore access to Outlook.com via the web and restore the sharing features of SkyDrive. These parts of the service were fully stabilized within a few hours of the initial incident.
A significant backlog of Exchange ActiveSync requests accumulated as we worked to stabilize access. To avoid another flood of traffic, we needed to restore access to Exchange ActiveSync slowly, which meant that some customers remained impacted for a longer period of time.”
Microsoft has also decided that it’s the time to issue an apology for all its users, as many have turned to the company’s support forums to express their frustration regarding the outage.
“We want to apologize to everyone who was affected by the outage, and we appreciate the patience you have shown us as we worked through the issues,” it said.
Outlook.com is playing a very important role for Microsoft’s long-term strategy, so the company has recently retired Hotmail and moved all its users to the revamped email platform.
At the same time, Outlook.com is Microsoft’s key product in the fight against Google, as the Scroogled campaign encourages users to dump Gmail and move to a service “that really cares about their privacy” and does not display ads based on the emails they receive.