back to article Outlook.com looking more like an outage outbreak for Europe

Microsoft's email services got hit with not one but two bugs today: in addition to an earlier blip with Exchange Online, Microsoft confirmed it is now probing "issues" with "some" Outlook.com users in Europe. According to downdetector.com, more than a thousand users have reported problems such as trouble receiving messages and …

  1. Ben Rose
    Megaphone

    Important Emails?

    Why on Earth would anybody have important emails in Hotmail? It's always been useless, I run servers at home with better uptime.

    1. Semtex451
      Trollface

      Re: Important Emails?

      Yea they should have stuck with AoL

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Important Emails?

        Compuserve are much more reliable and you get a free CD.

        1. Krack73

          Re: Important Emails?

          Is that the same as Freeserve, remember getting a lot of coasters from them at one point.

          1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

            Re: Important Emails?

            Is that the same as Freeserve, remember getting a lot of coasters from them at one point

            Likewise. And I did actually use them (in addition to my Demon account). And ended up getting ejected for "overuse" - I was on-line 24x7 on a line with only call-initiation charges (so cheaper to dial in once and stay logged in).

            The old days are the oldest.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Important Emails?

          You get a free CD? But how many computers now come with a 'free' optical drive, or any optical drive?

    2. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: Important Emails?

      Outlook.com isn't only Hotmail.

      It's also hosted business email. Not cheap either.

      So yes, a lot of people will be missing important stuff and will now be reading their contracts and probably realising that they have no comeback at all.

    3. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Important Emails?

      "Why on Earth would anybody have important emails in Hotmail?"

      Marketing people always send me important information to my spam bin Hotmail address.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intermittent connectivity

    I like this term, it means that you don't have to say it's completely titsup and there's no way to confirm it or prove otherwise.

    1. Nik 2

      Re: Intermittent connectivity

      Likewise 'Some Users' - it may be everyone except those in the server room.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A Microsoft mail infrastructure having difficulty scaling? Say it isn't so!

    Is it too much of a coincidence that my relatively large employer are moving to O365 right now? And are getting the impression that, despite reports, they're actually the first relatively large employer to do so...

    I love the smell of roast guinea pig in the morning...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      'Is it too much of a coincidence'

      More CloudFog...? Lets just blame it on 'Privacy Shield' 1-Year review...

    2. Alan Bourke

      Re: A Microsoft mail infrastructure having difficulty scaling? Say it isn't so!

      Our organisation is on it. Around 10k employees in all corners of the globe.

    3. Korev Silver badge

      Re: A Microsoft mail infrastructure having difficulty scaling? Say it isn't so!

      We're on O365 and have about 140k employees

  4. milonz

    Hello, i'm a Outlook user in France (mind, i also have a gmail account, but as my full name was already taken on gmail, i use my hotmail address as my "official" mail account, darthmaul_666@gmail.com doesn't sound like corporate/administrative compatible ;-)

    Outlook is pretty much titsup in Europe, yes.

    Intermittent web portal access.

    No outbound mail (the portal says "the user doesn't have the rights to send mail" or something like that).

    And probably no inbound neither (i've just ran some tests).

    The service seems broken since at least this morning.

    I suspect that the problem comes from a botched code update to the Outlook portal, rather than a server farm issue.

    As an IT professionnal, this kind of service interruptions (pretty frequent) only inspire one opinion : don't EVER migrate your corporate mails to Outlook 365, don't EVER buy any cloudified service from Microsoft =)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    @Foxy_Ravenclaw snarled: "Hey @Outlook thanks for all the help people are receiving I've missed important emails and others are stuck in limbo. WTF is happening?"

    *hands Foxy copies of RFCs 821, 5321, and 7230*

    Do better.

  6. bombastic bob Silver badge
    Devil

    "The Cloud" is SO overrated!

    and here's another outage to make that point

    1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

      Re: "The Cloud" is SO overrated!

      "The Cloud" - where cuckoo land lies

    2. teknopaul

      Re: "The Cloud" is SO overrated!

      I've never not had cloudy email.

      before Hotmail, is was your isp's job.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Outlook 365

    is now Outlook Zero until further notice.

  8. HWwiz

    O365

    And 365 as well. We have had hardly any email flow at all today for 1300 users.

    MS Fixed it at about 11.30, but by 3pm it was broken again.

    Bring back in-house Exchange !!!.

    1. Christian Berger

      Re: O365

      We live in a sad world where Exchange is seen as a competitive solution for E-Mail.

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I've had these messages all day

    450 4.7.3 Organization queue quota exceeded.

    Looks like they forgot to add more storage for hotmail.co.uk ;)

  10. Christian Berger

    This is e-mail, it shouldn't be complicated

    All those protocols are text-based and, by todays standards, utterly trivial.

    However we have a tendency for people to make trivial things more and more complex, up to the point when they fail. This is why we got webmail, and this is why some webmail providers try to complicate matters even more by putting their webmail servers into the "cloud".

    If you have important e-mail, get to a reputable provider, pay your xx Euros a year and use IMAP4, not webmail. It'll just work, it'll be lightning fast and you'll have next to no outages.

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: This is e-mail, it shouldn't be complicated

      "you'll have next to no outages."

      Except, of course, when your correspondent uses $CommodityEmailSupplier

  11. StuartFawcett

    Their customer communications around this issue during the event was almost non existent, their portal said it was up for over two hours when it wasn't. The is no Reason For Outage. And no comment on whether missed emails will return or be lost for ever.

    Microsoft's "like it or lump it" approach to support really shows it up during such situations.

    Now to email all contacts where i'm awaiting emails to see if they had sent them - grrr.

  12. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    From experience.

    What someone I know was getting was pretty much all day issues,but could receive on occasion. However all sent mail was going up with "There's been a problem" and chucking them in draft.

    Around 8:50pm BST it seemed to be sending again, but she was having to go into each draft and force a resend. Even then it was taking 30 to 60 seconds to confirm sent.

  13. FlyingSpaghettiMonster

    Forsome reason I've had these problems for about 10 days now. Thought my email address might finally have become an issue (after 20 years) but no. Ironically, outlook support team had no problems emailing ME to ask for more details. As far as I can tell, the only things I left out were my inside leg measurement and number of previous sexual partners. As I still can't email them (or anyone for that matter), I hope they read this and it's 31" and 12 1/2.

  14. GSTZ

    Are we barking up the right tree ?

    To some extent, Microsoft needs to be criticised for running notoriously unefficient Microsoft system and application software in their cloud, and also for underprovisioning even harder than other big cloud providers.

    On the other hand, it seems that other providers also had their share of trouble theses days. Here in Germany, besides Outlook.com also Deutsche Telekom, Vodafone, Unitymedia, O2 and 1&1 had problems across the board with their IP-based services which now also means telephony in many cases. Are we experiencing general Internet capacity shortages, probably caused by users wasting too much bandwidth watching silly stuff via Netflix and other streaming services, or by sending stupid cat videos all the time ?

    1. FlyingSpaghettiMonster

      Re: Are we barking up the right tree ?

      The mail problem is definitely within outlook /Hotmail /Microsoft. Test emails sent were "successful" but disappeared from accounts only to reappear 24 hours later. And as far as cats go, isn't "stupid cat" a tautology or something?

      1. GSTZ

        Re: Are we barking up the right tree ?

        The poor souls being paid for having to try to keep the Microsoft cloud working have admitted yesterday that they have trouble with load balancing. While this certainly can bring their cloud into serious trouble, and the resulting snafus can be the reason for all kinds of subsequent hiccups like emails going into Nirvana land, the underlying root cause - at least potentially - might still be too much load coming in and too much capacity eaten up by overloaded network error recovery protocols. Again, other service providers also were under pressure yesterday - maybe they did have somewhat less trouble because they provisioned their clouds just a bit better. There were more unhappy users than just the victims of Microsoft ...

        Everybody seems to assume that clouds and the Internet by definition have endless resources. Unfortunately this is not true, you still need a lot of bandwidth and compute resources to keep up that miracle. It may make sense to use resources more wisely - wasting those for streaming dull content to dull people isn't absolutely necessary. In earlier days, one could rent such content on DVD in a shop at the next corner ...

  15. PeterM42
    Facepalm

    Oh Dear!

    What have MicroCRAP failed to test now?

  16. FlyingSpaghettiMonster

    Was yesterday especially loadful online?

    1. GSTZ

      Internet load situation Sept. 18th

      According to the outage monitoring website I'm using, there have been high numbers of problem reports for various Internet-based services on Sept. 18th in Western Europe, in particular from the South of UK, Northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands, and western parts of Germany

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