14 DAY TRIAL // Earlier today, reports surfaced about a giant spam flood that managed to bypass Outlook and Hotmail's spam filters, drowning users in Viagra ads and Russian bride ads.
The issue started on the night between May 31 and June 1, 2016, and has slowly escalated until it reached peak annoyance during mid-day today.
Angry users flocked to show their annoyance on Reddit and Twitter, and Microsoft started an incident response event on the company's Office 365 Server Status page to investigate the issues.
After a few hours, the company did find something wrong and applied a quick patch to mitigate the spam problem and later during the day applied a permanent fix to address the issue for good.
Microsoft's status page shows that everything is up to normal now, and a quick look over our test Outlook inboxes shows the spam onslaught has stopped as well. Or at least it's hitting the Junk folder instead of the user inbox, as it should be.
Below are some user tweets regarding the recent spam wave, along with a snapshot of Microsoft's server status page with all the details regarding this recent spam incident.
On a side note, spam numbers have grown recently. PhishMe reports seeing a 789 percent increase in phishing spam in the first three months of the year, while ESET and Proofpoint revealed they've seen the biggest spam flood in years during the month of May 2016.
@Outlook @hotmail Is there a problem with your junk mail filter? My inbox is being filled with spam. — Adam Hill (@Ad70x7) June 1, 2016
HEY @Outlook @hotmail WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THE SPAM EMAILS TODAY? I've had almost 60 overnight and they're NOT GOING AWAY. — • erica jean • (@imbeingerica) June 1, 2016
THANK THE HEAVENS: the junk email onslaught from my @Outlook acct has finally stopped!! It was like spam armageddon in my #hotmail #outlookš — Adalia Nussenbaum (@anussenbaum) June 1, 2016
@Outlook yup spam dropped at around noon UK time. Thanks guys! — Robert Simmons (@robsimm) June 1, 2016
