May 13, 2011 10:10 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has fixed all issues related to Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) Exchange email service and revealed that customers should be able to use communicate under normal parameters. Dave Thompson, Corporate Vice-President, Microsoft Online Services confirmed problems that caused several outages earlier this week for Exchange Online offered through BPOS Standard, noting that Office 365 or other Microsoft services were unaffected.

“On Tuesday at 9:30am PDT, the BPOS-S Exchange service experienced an issue with one of the hub components due to malformed email traffic on the service. Exchange has the built-in capability to handle such traffic, but encountered an obscure case where that capability did not work correctly. The result was a growing backlog of email,” Thompson explained.

The software giant acted to resolve the issue first with a short term mitigation, and later with the implementation of a permanent fix. Although all Microsoft managed to isolate malformed traffic and clear mail queues by 12:00am PDT, the issue still resulted in downtime for customers, with delays of up to nine hours.

Malformed email traffic also impacted Exchange Online on Thursday May 12 starting with 9:10am PDT, but this time around the company moved a little faster, and had dealt with the issue in under an hour, resulting in delays of approximately 45 minutes for BPOS email users.

“A second, but related issue was detected via monitoring at 11:35am PDT, resulting in email stuck in some end users’ outboxes. The issue was remediated at 12:04pm PDT. During this time, more than 1.5 million messages had queued on the service awaiting delivery,” Thompson added.

“The backlog was 90% clear by 4:12 PM, but because of this large backlog of email, customers may have experienced delays of as long as 3 hours. We are implementing a comprehensive fix to both problems.”

And it appears that there was yet another incident, unrelated to the ones above, also on May 12. The last issue involved a failure in the Domain Name Service (DNS) hosting http://mail.microsoftonline.com.

“This failure, prevented users from accessing Outlook Web Access hosted in the Americas, and partially impacted some functionality of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync devices,” Thompson said.

It took Microsoft a few hours to resolve this particular glitch, but the company did so within the course of the day.

As a direct result of this week’s BPOS email outage, Microsoft will be issuing a service credit to all impacted customers per the service level agreement (SLA). In addition, the software giant will also revamp its communication methods to get information to customers as fast as possible.