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Microsoft Confirms Outlook Issues (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the connectivity-issues dept.

Microsoft has confirmed that some users of its email service Outlook are unable to send email or access their accounts. From a report: Hundreds from around Europe have commented on the website Downdetector that they have been affected by the problem -- many since Monday morning. One common issue seems to be that sent emails remain in the drafts folder and are not being delivered to recipients. On its website, Microsoft says the service dropped "unexpectedly" and it is working on a fix. Not all account holders are affected. "Intermittent connectivity is affecting customers in some European countries, which we are working to resolve as soon as possible," said a Microsoft representative.

41 comments

  1. Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Outlook is not having problems. Outlook.com is having problems.

    Small distinction, and even the BBC source has this wrong, but Outlook is a PROGRAM that doesn't require Office 365's cloud service to function. It isn't having any issues. The cloud service is.

    1. Re:Misleading by jbengt · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Outlook is not having problems. Outlook.com is having problems.

      This happened to me today. I sent 3 e-mails, then, about 1/2 hour after sending the first one, I noticed they were all stuck in my outbox. When I clicked on "Send All" Outlook.exe froze. I had to ctrl-alt-del to stop Outlook, and when restarted, the e-mails in the Outbox had disappeared - not Sent, not in Drafts, and not in Outbox. So I'd say that Office.exe was having problems too, in that it couldn't recover from the cloudy problems.

    2. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Outlook is not having problems. Outlook.com is having problems.

      Ummm, no. The second in no way precludes the first.

      Small distinction, and even the BBC source has this wrong, but Outlook is a PROGRAM that doesn't require Office 365's cloud service to function. It isn't having any issues. The cloud service is.

      Umm, why CAN'T "Outlook" also refer to the web site?

      Do you say "Let Me Google That For You" or "Let Me Google.com That For You"?

    3. Re:Misleading by Junta · · Score: 1

      Outlook is not having problems.

      Now I wouldn't go *that* far, though no particularly new problems granted.

      Of course, since MS is intentionally trying to blur the line between 'Outlook the app' and 'Outlook the microsoft hosted mail service', they are asking for any negative implications.

      Of course the most blatantly misguided Microsoft branding confusion award goes to 'Skype' versus 'Skype for Business' which have *zero* to do with each other.

      --
      XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
    4. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      In the microsoft world people don't know the difference so the article is fair enough.

    5. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm pretty sure the only ones that know the difference are those in Microsoft world.

    6. Re: Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think most readers here would see "email service Outlook" and deduce the reference was to an online facility. However, given that my outlook desktop application routinely does this when faced with a temporarily interrupted communication channel then it seems to me to be a truism regardless of interpretation.

    7. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      And is it Office 365 as a whole, or the Outlook.com consumer platform?

      Looks like it's an isolated outage to "outlook.com" for Europe.

    8. Re:Misleading by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      but Outlook is a PROGRAM that doesn't require Office 365's cloud service to function. It isn't having any issues. The cloud service is.

      This wouldn't happen if the cloud service was in the cloud. There are no problems with the cloud.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    9. Re:Misleading by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 1

      Do you say "Let Me Google That For You" or "Let Me Google.com That For You"?

      I say do a search. Not everyone uses Google.

      --
      The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
    10. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      > I had to ctrl-alt-del to stop Outlook

      What ancient OS are you still using? Ctrl-Alt-Del brings up the Lock/Switch User/Sign out/Task Manager screen and has done so for a very long time now. Ctrl-Alt-Del hasn't been used to kill processes since what, the end of the Win9x line?

    11. Re:Misleading by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have this problem often when Outlook is having problems writing to its datastore. It feels like (I don't know exactly how this work, but like most things, if I get it horribly wrong someone's bound to come along and call me stupid and correct me, and it will be a lot faster/more accurate than simply asking, so here goes) it has some sort of internal memory cache of the sent items that hopefully eventually maps to the items stored in the on-disk database, and when it stops being able to write to the on-disk database, it freezes up. If I feel this is coming on sometimes I can quickly drag the items over to the desktop to copy them. After it really freezes up, they're gone - restart and they don't pop up since they weren't in the on-disk database. But if I got them copied over to the desktop I can open from there and resend.

      Terribly annoying, happens 2-3 times/week, on Windows 7 with Outlook in cached mode (~6gb on local Exchange mailbox).

      Please, call me all the names you want, a genuine and believable discussion on the actual mechanics of this situation would be great.

    12. Re:Misleading by whoever57 · · Score: 1

      It's raining in Redmond today.

      Do you really expect cloud services to be unaffected by rain?

      --
      The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  2. First - Yeah the Cloud! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    The Cloud is the WAY to go.

    If I'm not first, it's the Cloud.

    1. Re:First - Yeah the Cloud! by Z00L00K · · Score: 1

      And at this moment it still has problems.

      Imagine the man-hours lost on delayed mails for some businesses.

      If this continues, then there's the possibility that businesses consider to take home their mail services again.

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. Neat. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Neat.

  4. Switch to the cloud!! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let the whole world depend on one provider. Let the global economy depend on it! Switch to the cloud now! ASAP! What could go wrong?

  5. Magic 8-ball by TWX · · Score: 4, Funny

    When the Magic 8-ball told me "Outlook not so good" I believed it. I still do.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
    1. Re:Magic 8-ball by bogaboga · · Score: 1

      I prefer its interface to Yahoo Mail or GMail.

      Which service is *so good* anyway?

    2. Re:Magic 8-ball by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I prefer its interface to Yahoo Mail or GMail.

      Which service is *so good* anyway?

      the best user interfaces are so good you can't even tell when the service is down

    3. Re:Magic 8-ball by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      if bogaboga's advocating for Outlook, it probably has a well-known FSB backdoor.

  6. Prediction time by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Magic 8-Ball says: "Outlook not so good."

  7. Clarification by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The following are all discrete programs, site, or services.

    Outlook.exe
    Outlook.com
    Office365.com
    Microsoft365

    It should all be perfectly cromulent now.

  8. Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by prasadsurve · · Score: 1

    That's news to me.

    1. Re:Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I remember when Outlook was seen as huge improvement, when we switched from Lotus Notes :-/

    2. Re:Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by freeze128 · · Score: 1

      Isn't it just the successor to HOTMAIL.COM?

    3. Re:Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by foradoxium · · Score: 2

      you mean msn.com, then hotmail.com, then live.com, now outlook.com.

    4. Re:Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      EVERYBODY that uses hosted email from microsoft, whether it's free webmail or a subscription 'cloud' service uses it. so that's a very large number of people.. hundreds of millions.

      this particular issue is probably localized to a server or server cluster that provides service to that region.

    5. Re:Wow. People use outlook.com for email? by schleimkeim · · Score: 1

      i still have my hotmail.com

  9. Outlook not so good by whoever57 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I was looking at delayed delivery of an email that went via outlook.com just yesterday. This was an old email: the problem happened in August, I think.

    Looking at the headers, the email was first delivered to Microsoft's network and spent almost a day entirely within Microsoft's network.

    After a day, came Microsoft's first attempt to deliver the email to my server, which resulted in a temporary failure (I use postgrey). It then took more than a day before Microsoft attempted delivery again.

    Why anyone relies on Microsoft for infrastructure, I have no idea. While all cloud infrastructure providers have issues, Microsoft appears to have more.

    --
    The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
  10. Easy recovery for lost mail by deviated_prevert · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just retrieve the contents from the NSA servers.

    --
    This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
  11. Alternate headline: God confirms water is wet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Secondary headline: No Shit, Sherlock

  12. What does Netcraft say? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Netcraft confirms Outlook bad

  13. Need an Up detector by ilsaloving · · Score: 3, Informative

    There needs to be an alternate site that tells you when a site is actually up. Outlook.com seems to have so many outages that it seems easier to track when it's up rather than when it's down.

    http://downdetector.com/status...

    1. Re:Need an Up detector by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Why not go straight at the source, which has relevant details, instead of some third-party that can only report a Y/N status?

      https://portal.office.com/servicestatus

    2. Re:Need an Up detector by ilsaloving · · Score: 2

      Because a) it doesn't provide a long term history of failures, and b) Microsoft can't be trusted to be honest about the scope of their failures (ie: "blah blah blah only a small subset of users are affected" when all of Europe is unavailable)

    3. Re: Need an Up detector by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      c) because the MS DNS servers seem to be borked right now and portal.office.com hasn't been resolving for the last 15 minutes or so.

  14. Official statement to customers by theendlessnow · · Score: 4, Funny

    Thank you for purchasing Office 235.

    We are sorry to report that we are experiencing some problems....etc.

  15. As a former Microsoftie... by richrz · · Score: 1

    I no longer have to use Office 364. Woohoo!

  16. Leap Year Security Time Stamp Error by davesays · · Score: 1

    "Please download and install Microsoft Office 365.25, compatible with the Gregorian calendar." This should keep things synched up! :-)

  17. seriously guys by schleimkeim · · Score: 1

    there are way too many people on this site that are affected by this.