GoKawiilMicrosoft Defender for Office 365 mistakenly blocks Google search links
Microsoft confirmed its Defender for Office 365 Safe Links feature is incorrectly flagging legitimate Google search URLs as malicious, showing users 'not safe' warnings when they try to click them. The company said the problem stems from an inaccurate security classification and is generating false alerts for IT admins in Microsoft Sentinel and the Defender portal. Pasting the blocked links directly into a browser does not bypass the warning.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
Safe Links is a core anti-phishing tool used by enterprise Microsoft 365 customers, so a false positive at this scale disrupts everyday workflows and floods security teams with misleading alerts. It also highlights the risk of automated threat-detection systems producing false positives that can erode trust in security tooling if not fixed quickly.
- Microsoft Defender's Safe Links feature is wrongly blocking valid Google search URLs due to a misclassification bug.
- IT administrators are seeing unnecessary alerts in Microsoft Sentinel and the Defender portal tied to the issue.
- Microsoft is working on a fix but hasn't specified which regions or how many users are affected.
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Published there as: “Microsoft Defender flags legitimate Google search links as malicious”
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