Technicians at Microsoft have had a week from hell trying to deal with multiple email-related issues. Since Saturday, March 1, many customers worldwide have been unable to send or receive emails, with some people even being locked out of their Microsoft emails altogether.

When the issues first arose, people were unable to access Outlook features, and other Microsoft 365 services were also affected. According to a post on the Microsoft 365 Status X account, the problems were caused by the firm attempting to update the email server’s programming language: “We’ve identified a potential cause of [the] impact and have reverted the suspected code to alleviate [the] impact. We’re monitoring telemetry to confirm recovery.” This left customers bemoaning what appeared to be Microsoft implementing faulty code before it had been fully tested.

To make matters worse, despite Microsoft subsequently announcing in the early hours of Sunday morning that “the service is restored,” people trying to access their Microsoft account emails on iPhone (myself included!) continued to see messages asking them to re-enter their password. At one point, I was told that my account had been blocked, even though I could sign in on a different device.

And the issue still hadn’t been resolved when people turned up to work on Monday morning, with customers around the globe continuing to report that they couldn’t log in, reset their passwords, or recover their Outlook accounts.

What’s more, the issues weren’t restricted to Microsoft Outlook. Indeed, in a new post on Monday, Microsoft announced that it was “investigating an issue impacting Microsoft Teams-provisioned auto attendants and call queues” caused by “a potential authentication token issue.” Even though the company later confirmed that “the service has been successfully recovered,” customers continued to report that Teams, Outlook, and other Microsoft services, including the Microsoft Edge browser, remained inaccessible or not fully functional.

Fast-forward to Wednesday, March 5, by which time you would have expected all the issues to be resolved. Sadly, this still wasn’t the case for some people trying to access their Microsoft emails using the iPhone Mail app. The Microsoft Service Status web page said, “Users may be unable to access their email using the native mail app on iOS devices.” Although it’s not clear whether these issues are related to the problems that started nearly a week ago, they have meant that some people have been unable to access, receive, or send emails without facing any hiccups for a sustained period of time.

At the time of writing (Friday, March 7), the service status hadn’t changed, and an added note suggested that Microsoft is working hard to get to the root of the problem: “We’re progressing with our analysis of available data as we isolate the underlying source of users’ problems when accessing their email when using the native mail app on iOS devices.” That said, it doesn’t look like the issue will be resolved anytime soon, with Microsoft anticipating the next update coming at 9 PM (UTC) on Friday evening.

Source: Forbes