Microsoft struggles against self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage
Seven days is a long time in cloud
Microsoft engineers are struggling to fix a seven-day-old, self-inflicted Office 365 IMAP outage.
IMAP access to Office 365 tanked on January 18, meaning customers could not access emails using Exchange Online via IMAP or connect third-party mail clients via IMAP.
Microsoft told disgruntled Office 365 customers that the problem affected a limited number of licensees – but that those customers hit had a "large number of users.”
The culprit was found to be a botched Microsoft update that stopped the IMAP protocol automatically loading data from Exchange Online databases.
Following preliminary analysis of the cause, Microsoft told disgruntled users on January 22:
As part of our efforts to improve service performance, an update was deployed to a subset of code which is responsible for obtaining the subscribed folder list. However, the update caused a code issue that prevented the list from being automatically loaded.
Microsoft promised to fix the problem by January 23 – five days after the outage. Those plans then had to be pushed back. Restoration time for the service was estimated for today (January 25), however, Microsoft is still nowhere near a fix.
Meanwhile, one Reg reader got in touch today to complain that all mail sign-ins – including Exchange protocol – had gone titsup.
Microsoft, meanwhile, told users: “The deployment process is taking longer than initially expected due to a configuration issue.
“Engineers reconfigured the problematic portion of capacity and are continuing to monitor the deployment to ensure it propagates throughout the infrastructure in a timely manner. Customers will begin to experience service restoration as the deployment progresses.” ®
Similar topics
Broader topics
Narrower topics
- AWS
- Azure
- Bing
- BSoD
- Cloud native
- Content delivery network
- Edge Computing
- Excel
- Google Cloud Platform
- G Suite
- Hybrid Cloud
- IaaS
- iCloud
- Internet Explorer
- Kubernetes
- Microsoft 365
- Microsoft Build
- Microsoft Edge
- Microsoft Office
- Microsoft Surface
- Microsoft Teams
- .NET
- Outlook
- Paas
- Patch Tuesday
- Pluton
- Private Cloud
- Public Cloud
- Serverless
- SharePoint
- Skype
- SQL Server
- Virtualization
- Visual Studio
- Visual Studio Code
- vSphere
- Windows
- Windows 10
- Windows 11
- Windows 7
- Windows 8
- Windows Server
- Windows Server 2003
- Windows Server 2008
- Windows Server 2012
- Windows Server 2013
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows XP
- Xbox
- Xbox 360