Still can't get to your Outlook mailbox? You aren't alone

Problems with Outlook.com are continuing, with users reporting being unable to access their emails or authenticate themselves. Part of the issue appears to be related to the initial wobble over the weekend. Some of the users affected by that outage were locked out of their accounts after repeated login failures, and Microsoft' …

[JimmyPage]

As Mrs Thatcher once said

"If someone is using Outlook at the age of 25 then they can consider themselves a failure"

I appreciate for home users it may be the simplest route.

But no one in any grown up capacity should be (a) promoting or (b) using any form of cloud based webmail. Unless they are prepared for the inevitable "oh dear, how sad, too bad" moment.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As Mrs Thatcher once said

Tell it to the company I work for not to me

And fuck Thatcher

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: As Mrs Thatcher once said

No fuck you.

[Peter2]

Has anybody else found that they have problems problem emailing outlook.com or hotmail.com addresses this week?

They seemed to be returning NDR's with:-

550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [IP] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3150).

And that "part of the ISP's network" was seemingly a fairly large chunk of the UK address space, which is the most stupid thing that i've seen since an antispam blocklist which blocked ~40% of the total IPv4 pool.

[Smartypantz]

I haven't seen it, but i'll check the logs, been running my own mail server since 2006, so lives in peacefull bliss :-)

[Peter2]

Me too; i'm wondering if it's actually an attempt to push people running on prem servers to exchange online by making it unviable to run on prem.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not running my own, but my ISP runs FreeBSD which was enough of an argument to leave it with them - and yes, no problem either.

[MiguelC]

WTF El Reg???

"In the meantime, affected users could use a different email service, such as Gmail. However, this will not help in scenarios where mailbox access is needed or when checking for new emails rolling in."

So, except for burner mailboxes for subs, which probably were already out of scope for your main Outlook box, you can use Gmail for everything except all typical email use scenarios, like reading and answering emails?

[Doctor Syntax]

I've had my own domain run by an MSP for some time with a legacy Hotmail A/C and one Gmail address receiving messages from a web contact page.

When Gmail started messing with OAth2 (not then supported by the Seamonkey client) I ditched it for an Outlook address, subsequently replaced by another domain run by the MSP.

When MS started messing with OAuth2 I set it the legacy Hotmail to forward to a mailbox on the my domain. AFAICS that's worked while everyone else has been reporting outages.

No Gmail, only legacy Hotmail, no OAuth2 extending the attack/failure surface. Stuff just works.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

I finally got around to starting to move my important stuff to Proton Mail with Outlook (Office Pro 20something), all the spam stuff can stay on Gmail.

[MachDiamond]

"all the spam stuff can stay on Gmail."

I have far too many clients that use Gmail accounts and it's no end of problems. Even when they have their own domain, they'll backend with google and use a gmail address. Sheesh.

I've long since deleted my gmail account. If it's free, it's crap.

[Anonymous Coward]

Years ago our institution switched from Zimbra to Outlook and it has been downhill ever since.

[Tron]

The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

Passwords. One way to break your services.

2FA. Two ways to break your services.

MFA. Multiple ways to break your services.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

Had a good 2FA mess today Employee left company almost two years ago. Turned out he had registered domains with an ISP. Bi-annual renewal appears. We login with his username and password... but don't have his phone for 2FA. Attempt to go through steps to reset the 2FA... and the large USA company demands we supply a drivers licence for this ex-employee. Even though this is a company account with a company email used to register. What fun.

[J. Cook]

Re: The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

a long time ago at a different employer we ran into a problem where the dial up internet service we were using wouldn't let us cancel service without authorization from the person who had set up the service- said person had passed away unexpectedly, and their replacement was getting things sorted out. We had to get copies of the death certificate in order to cancel each account, or at least until one of the owners of the company contacted someone high up over at the ISP, who agreed to do a "one time" bulk cancellation for us. (There might have been involvement from lawyers, I can't remember.)

The replacement service was much more sensible.

[MachDiamond]

Re: The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

"Had a good 2FA mess today Employee left company almost two years ago. Turned out he had registered domains with an ISP. Bi-annual renewal appears. "

That's a massive breakdown in policy that's the same as somebody paying for a company used service with a credit card under their name. They are the client that company knows, not the firm using the account.

I have a friend that had another friend set up a web site for him and they had a falling out at some point. All of a sudden my friend's website stopped working. Nobody paid the hosting bill and my friend wasn't the registered owner of the domain. It took a couple of days to get that sorted. My friend's is a musician that well known in the Blues genre and the site was his name and also his main way to announce things. It's all in his name now and the domain got paid for the next 10 years and by that time, he'd be fully retired or passed away given his age. I keep a backup of his site just in case and we've made sure that his domain and hosting are through different companies.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The difference that 2FA and MFA make to your services.

Totally agree this is a policy mess. Never have you seen such an anarchistic company who lacks management like this one. Even though M365 is in place, each staff member uses their own choices of (free) Gmail, Sharepoint or email attachments. The employee who had left used to have insanely complex ten letter passwords on the desktops that change every three months, but all external suppliers passwords were Companyname01 or CompanyName01xx where the xx are initials of the supplier. This is how I managed to guess that password for the domain names.

What I can't get my head around is that someone was happily paying the bill without questioning it. It was only because I was in a company mailbox looking for email on a different matter did I happen to see this one.

Some times you wonder how outfits continue to operate. And then you look at the mess at Microsoft \ Apple \ Google with mess like this email bug and you realise where these staff migrate too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Refunds available

It is recommended to contact Microsoft for a refund for the days without services. Part of the full money back guarantee on the free mailbox...

Or, as they often say. You get what you pay for.

On a side tangent - this also seems to be linked to an Apple update. I had a UK client whose wife's iPhone played up on business M365 mail after iOS updated. He was fine. Next day his phone updated, and his mail then played up. For them the fix was easy - just put the password back in. I have over a dozen like that this week. All fixed with a password + 2FA freshly entered.

One person did contact me with a free Hotmail hiccup - but they were lucky as it was also just re-enter the correct password and up and running again.

Something makes me think this is bugs on both sides...

[Tim99]

Re: Refunds available

Around Christmas, for about 3 months, I was regularly getting a request from MS to reset my iPhone Mail password. Apparently my Apple Mail clients are deemed to be "unsafe". The messages always had a link to the MS mail client, and Office 365 with a recommendation to "upgrade". Similar message from Mail on my iMac have turned up a couple of times in the last few days - Presumably related?

I have had the mail account since the 1990s, and only use it for less-critical stuff and a few individuals that use MS Mail. Fortunately it only takes a couple of second to reset with "Passwords". I'm debating pulling it as the annoyance level is approaching "I really can't be bothered anymore"; and "Is it worth emailing my MS contacts to tell them to use another of my accounts?".

[MachDiamond]

Re: Refunds available

"'m debating pulling it as the annoyance level is approaching "I really can't be bothered anymore"; and "Is it worth emailing my MS contacts to tell them to use another of my accounts?"."

I'd do that. I've got a load of email accounts for different things and they are all under my domains and hosting. If I'm not sure about something, I'll hand out my current temp email address. When that address starts attracting spam, it gets deleted and I create another one. Anybody that I want to shift over, I send them an email with a more permanent address or at least a less temporary one.

[Joe Zeff]

Decades later, it hasn't changed.

Back in the 90's and early 2000's I did tech support for an ISP. It didn't take me long to learn that in those days all versions of Outlook were masses of bugs held together by security holes. I've never used Outlook myself, and I've never had to deal with it since then, but it's quite clear that in that respect, it hasn't changed a bit. Why big corporations insist on using it as their only email client is something I've never understood. It can't be that it's free, as there are a number of other free clients that work much better.

[J. Cook]

Re: Decades later, it hasn't changed.

Well, there's the whole momentum thing with Exchange, and that it's a reasonable mashup of calendering, email, and contact management in one single application / server. I'm not saying that it's good by any means, but finding a replacement that's not worse is... difficult.

My experience with dealing with Outlook and Exchange is part of the reason why I have grey hairs already. (and dealing with a support team that, at one point, was under the opinion that the RTM release of Office would work out of the box with an up to date version of Exchange without having to have a service pack and a minimum of three critical patches installed to make that connectivity work- this was a 9 month argument that was a major stressor.)

[biddibiddibiddibiddi]

"No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems" -- Wouldn't zero be the correct number to use? They just bother to make it changeable.

No point in commenting otherwise about Microsoft screwing up Outlook Online again. Just another day ending in Y (in English anyway) so of course there's some sort of 365 outage.

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in "the day" reliable meant that it always worked

Modern IT - reliable means "secure"

So if you can't get to your email it has "failed safe": and is working as expected.

[stiine]

is 2145 here and i can still sign in

But I'm getting a red "This message can't be saved right now. Please try again later." message when I try to reply to a message. I was receiving this same message yesterday before they announced the problem...

[xyz]

No 'zero days without incident' sign for Microsoft thanks ongoing problems

I always thought it was in binary..

Anyway I'm sure MS will be along shortly to skypeify hotmail. They've been updating the app clients for weeks now, so I presumed it was going to become unusable.

[Tony W]

Email SPOF

Unless you run your own mail system, email is a SPOF. As a sole trader and private individual I've had my own domain for many years with email provided by the hosting company. Fine until that company goes bad, which has happened more than a few times for various reasons, the most usual being sell-out to a bigger company. Even forwarding incoming email to another account won't totally deal with that, as sometimes vital mail can be delayed for long periods or even lost, and as others have said, 2FA can cause really serious problems.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Email SPOF

Yeah we know

Any solutions there Professor?

[DoctorPaul]

Re: Email SPOF

Try Mythic Beasts as a hosting provider, as recommended by denizens of this 'ere forum.

I'm retired now, so needs are minimal. Three quid a month (including VAT) gets me basic hosting with PHP and a MySQL database and unlimited email addresses, although catch-all redirection means I just need one mailbox to support an effectively infinite number of email addresses. Need to register somewhere? That email will be yourcompany @ mydomain.whatever.

My previous provider got subsumed into the GoDaddy empire and, as I don't do business with fascists or slaughterers of wildlife, I moved my hosting and that of my few remaining pro-bono clients to MB. While I was transferring mailboxes from one to the other I had both providers webmail clients (Roundcube in both cases) open in adjacent tabs in Firefox so thought that I would compare their search performance. MB returned a result in 10 seconds or so, GoDaddy just span it's wheels for a minute or so and then timed out.

Edit: forgot to say that their tech support is exemplary as well.