14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s services went down yesterday in a totally unexpected event, and shortly after that, Microsoft’s Outlook email platform also suffered an outage of its own.
Users were no longer able to connect to their Outlook mailboxes, and Microsoft confirmed the problems in a post on the company’s service status page.
“Some users can't access their mailbox within Outlook.com. Users may be unable to access their mailbox when using Outlook.com. We're gathering diagnostic data for analysis,” Microsoft said in the first notification published online.
The later updates confirmed the problem was related to an AD query, revealing later during the day that it managed to address the problems and everything should be working correctly for Outlook users.
“We've confirmed that an AD query is causing resource contention to the service and resulting in impact. We're analyzing the query in more detail to help us determine the next steps to mitigate the issue,” Microsoft said before adding later during the day that “we're continuing to investigate the directory query to better understand the issue.”
Outlook was the only one impacted
The software giant later said only some users in Europe were impacted, but right now, everything is supposed to be working correctly, with everyone able to access their mailboxes just fine.
“Further investigation has determined the scope of impact is significantly lower than previously thought. We’re continuing to investigate the issue, however, this will be the last update for this communication,” Microsoft said.
At the time of writing, I’m able to access Outlook correctly, with no issues whatsoever. Furthermore, Microsoft’s service status page indicates that everything is working correctly right now, not only for Outlook, but also for the rest of the services.
Outlook was the only product affected by the outage, with Skype, OneDrive, Office, and Microsoft Teams running properly during the whole thing.