There are several users of Microsoft email and office 365. If one is not able to access the emails then work and for some people, life comes to a standstill. This is exactly what several Microsoft email and office 365 users experienced on this Friday. Life was almost hell for these users for several hours.
What exactly happened on Friday to the Microsoft email services?
On Friday many users did not get emails on Friday. Mostly users from Europe and the Asia Pacific were affected.
When these users tried to access their emails they got the message that the service is temporarily not available. Try again later. This message got displayed not for few minutes but for several hours.
The continent that was worst affected was Europe. There were some users in Europe who wrote on different forums that they did not get emails for a whopping 14 hours.
Even the users from the United States were affected. Many users reported that they were not getting external emails and the location was found to be multiple states of the United States.
There were also reports that people were not even able to log into Skype. It was found that many countries were not able to access email marketing messages via Office 365 on Friday.
Some users found that if they tried to log into Office 365 through Microsoft authentication then it failed. But those who had SSO enabled did not face any issues.
Microsoft’s cloud-based service Azure Active Directory was also not working properly. It was restored later.
Microsoft’s written acknowledgment:
Microsoft acknowledged on Twitter that they are looking into the matter. They said that they are investigating the issues that their dear customers were facing while trying to log in to Microsoft Account and Office 365.
They said that their Network Operation Centre Engineers were working on this and were trying to resolve the issue.
Later in the day, they said that they had completed all the recovery actions. They said that the issue is as of now completely resolved. They also thanked the users who had confirmed the restoration of services.
What makes the timing of the issue unfortunate for Microsoft?
The main reason that the timing was unfortunate is that Microsoft had only spoken a lot and in much detail about its new security features for Office 365.
There were ironic comments like that it looked like they ( that is Microsoft) had secured all the data by cleverly removing the user access completely. Some even called it wryly end to end email encryption.
Only recently Microsoft had said that they are providing new protection options to Office 365 users. This included recovery of files from ransomware and other malicious attacks.
They said that they are providing tools to keep the data secure and private. They also claimed that they are now giving better protection from viruses and cybercrime.
Shortly after they had promoted these services the users faced the problem with the emails. Naturally, it created a very difficult situation for this global giant.
However, they have tried their level best to restore the services. One can only hope that these incidents do not get repeated in the future.
But the devastating time that millions of users went through for so many hours was really unfortunate.