14 DAY TRIAL // If you couldn’t access your Microsoft Office 365 mailbox on January 24, it wasn’t just you, as the service went down, and it apparently took Microsoft several hours to resolve it.
Users reporting the problem on Twitter criticized the company for its slow reaction, with some saying that they signaled the outage to Microsoft many hours before it actually acknowledged it.
However, Microsoft confirmed in a tweet that there were indeed issues in some regions, acknowledging that a number of customers weren’t able to access their mailboxes.
“We're investigating an issue where users can't access their mailboxes through multiple protocols. More details are published in the admin center under EX172491, available to your Microsoft 365 admin. Our team is currently working hard to resolve this, and we appreciate your patience!” the company said.
Issue already fixed?
In a follow-up tweet, Microsoft added that it was working on resolving the issues, all without providing any specifics on the regions that were affected.
“We’ve determined that a subset of Domain Controller infrastructure is unresponsive, resulting in user connection time outs. We’re applying steps to mitigate the issue. More details can be found in the admin center published under EX172491,” it said.
By the looks of things, Office 365 was down mostly in Europe, though customers in the United Kingdom were seemingly not affected. The United States customer base was not affected by this outage.
At the time of writing this article, Office 365 should be working as expected, though I’m also seeing limited reports from customers who cannot access their mailboxes.
DownDetector.com indicates there may be some issues in London, Belgium, and the Netherlands, with several other possible smaller issues in other parts of Europe. The service also claims Office 365 customers in New York may experience similar problems when accessing Microsoft’s product.