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 …
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.
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...
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 =)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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 ...
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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