14 DAY TRIAL // iOS 11 has turned out to be a major fiasco for a significant number of users, as the OS update caused a wide variety of issues, including poor battery life and app crashes.
Microsoft users, however, were affected by a more special bug: Outlook.com, Office 365, and Exchange email accounts no longer worked after installing iOS 11, with the email sending feature blocked for no clear reason.
Apple and Microsoft worked together on addressing the problem and with the release of iOS 11.0.1 the two fixed it, though as we reported yesterday, some other bugs were actually introduced and affecting an important share of iPhone owners.
Update to iOS 11.0.1… or not
Apple confirmed in a knowledge base article on its support website that it was aware of a Microsoft email issue in iOS 11 and recommended users to install iOS 11.0.1 as soon as possible. No public announcements were made whatsoever, so unless users manually searched the support website for such documentation, it was little chance they discovered the advisory.
“You might not be able to send email with an Outlook.com, Office 365, or Exchange account until you update to iOS 11.0.1,” Apple explains in the notification quietly rolled out on September 26.
“If your email account is hosted by Microsoft on Outlook.com or Office 365, or an Exchange Server 2016 running on Windows Server 2016, you might see this error message when you try to send an email with iOS 11: ‘Cannot Send Mail. The message was rejected by the server.’ To fix the issue, update to iOS 11.0.1 or later.”
But while iOS 11.0.1 indeed fixes this email bug, which for some Microsoft customers is critical, the update also introduces several other issues, such as terrible battery life on a number of devices, including the iPhone 7 and the recently-released iPhone 8.
In most of the cases, updating to the latest version of an operating system is the thing to do given the security improvements and bug fixes that are typically part of each release, but this time a growing number of customers seem to prefer to just wait for another update or even downgrade to iOS 10.3.3 until a more stable experience is provided.