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Microsoft Exchange Online outage blocks access to mailboxes

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Why This Matters

The ongoing Microsoft Exchange Online outage highlights the critical dependence of businesses and consumers on cloud-based email services. It underscores the importance of robust infrastructure and rapid incident response to minimize disruptions in communication tools that are vital for daily operations. As Microsoft works to resolve these issues, it also prompts the industry to prioritize resilience and contingency planning for cloud service outages.

Key Takeaways

Microsoft is working to address an ongoing Exchange Online outage that is preventing customers from accessing their mailboxes and calendars.

"We're investigating reports of some users experiencing issues when accessing their Exchange Online mailbox via one or more connection methods," Microsoft said when it acknowledged the issue at 06:42 AM UTC.

As Microsoft explained in a Microsoft 365 admin center update under EX1253275, Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop, Exchange ActiveSync, and other Exchange Online connection protocols are all affected by this outage.

While the company said that "telemetry continues to show the issue is no longer occurring for affected users" and that its engineers are "continuing to monitor service health to assess whether any additional actions are required to ensure sustained recovery," customers are still reporting issues accessing their email.

Right before publishing, the Office.com web portal was down and displayed the message "We are sorry, something went wrong. Please try refreshing the page in a few minutes."

Office.com down (BleepingComputer)

​Microsoft is also investigating a separate outage affecting the Microsoft 365 Copilot web sign‑in page and Copilot web clients at office.com/chat and m365.cloud.microsoft, m365.cloud.microsoft/chat, and copilot.cloud.microsoft.

Customers who need to use Microsoft Copilot are advised to use one of the application-based Microsoft Copilot services, including the Microsoft Copilot desktop app, Copilot in Microsoft Teams, or Copilot in Office apps.

"We've identified that a section of service infrastructure is not processing traffic efficiently. We're making configuration changes to remediate impact," the company said in an admin center service alert (MO1253428).

In January, Microsoft mitigated another Exchange Online service outage that intermittently blocked users from accessing their mailboxes via the Internet Mailbox Access Protocol 4 (IMAP4).

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