iOS users left refreshing in vain as Microsoft Outlook woes drag on Users of Microsoft Outlook on Apple devices are experiencing service disruptions for a second day. The online wobble, which started in the wee hours of March 4, relates to accessing email via the native mail app on iOS gadgets and continues to confound engineers at Microsoft. First acknowledgement of the problem came at …
So as the admin of a small outfit running MS365 I find that adding shared mailboxes to Outlook on MacOS, iOS and Windows 11 are ALL different. On W11 they appear in a folder in a users folder tree under “Shared with me”, which is unique to W11. On MacOS you have to add them under Delegation, and I can’t quite remember how you do it on iOS but it’s neither of those. I had to Google extensively to get the W11 situation and came across numerous posts that claimed new new new Outlook didn’t actually support shared mailboxes on W11. Oh and they aren’t supported on native iOS Mail so hence forced to use Outlook which doesn’t support tasks or contacts, ffs.
Whatever happened to cross platform consistency? Are there really several product development teams working in different bunkers who are forbidden to talk to each other, because it very much looks like it.
We run a small MSP and have had call after call from our customers saying that their email on their iPhones isn’t working. Most of the time entering the password fixes it, but it takes people to a Microsoft website to authenticate (windows.net or in some cases live.com) but then it highlights another problem. The problem is that sometimes it needs to authenticate with Microsoft Authenticator and sometimes it doesn’t. And when it does, users have often bought a new phone in the meantime or just deleted the Authenticator app. And it’s no use relying on phone backups to remember the authenticator information because it’s deliberately nobbled by MS to never back up the actual 2fa secrets. So we need to reset the 2fa on their sometimes-works-sometimes-doesn’t admin website.
The result? A shitshow. It’s buggy, slow, annoying and seemingly designed to be as awkward as possible.
why the negative sentiment?
Sounds like a perfect oppurtunity to begin the discussion on potentially moving away from ms and reskilling with alternative toolsets/solutions with healthier profit margins to boot
Either way. its office 365 so its not your problem, just send the relevant ms cockup info to customers and aspouse equal frustration, your off the hook :)
Consider nightmare scenario of running your own exchange server and the same thing happening, shudder shudder
Guaranteed..... after this is over, your customers will happily go into blissfull amnesiacal ignorance once again
Bottom line... they won't hold payment for "acts of god... sorry... acts of ms" beyond the control of us mortals, hahaha
I had a curious issue - I couldn't search Outlook for 48 hours (resolved by itself)
I was unable to type anything into the search field (top bar)... After typing 3-4 characters, it would eject me from the field. Other Windows search fields (file explorer et al) weren't affected.
I started being unable to download mail from a web Exchange server to Evolution running on a RHEL system very recently.
I was putting it down to our Exchange administrators pulling a permission from my account, because I get a "Forbidden" message in Evolution, but I wonder whether this issue could be a contributing factor.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
