Angry 123-Reg customers in the UK wake up to another day where hosted mail doesn't get through to users on Microsoft email accounts

Our own customers think we're ignoring them, say irate business owners

Users of UK web hosting firm 123-Reg’s email service told The Reg this morning that 96 hours after clocking the issue, they are still having trouble sending emails to users with Microsoft's Live, Outlook or Hotmail accounts.

For its part, 123-Reg has confirmed “delays in delivering emails to Hotmail/Outlook/Live email addresses,” but provided no ETA for a fix. According to the issue ticket on its status page, filed on Saturday, September 5, the firm claimed to have identified the root cause - which it has yet to explain - and said it was "working with Microsoft" to resolve it. The issue is not believed to affect the delivery of emails being sent by customers on 123-Reg's Microsoft 365 "platform".

Several users have claimed the mail-forwarding issues actually began on Friday morning.

Predictably, punters are irate, with many complaining the outage is causing lost business and reputational damage.

Day ***SIX*** and email is STILL out. What are you doing about this? When will it be fixed? What about lost business and health critical emails? This is NOT good enough. We need updates, a fix and compensation. #123Outage

— MK14 Man (@mk14man) September 8, 2020

We have swapped to @gsuite from 123reg mail due to ongoing issues with mail not being sent to outlook/hotmail accounts and losing business or getting angry emails from customers who think we are ignoring them #SupportSmallBiz

— j and r (@jrpersonalised) September 7, 2020

@123reg Can I get some clarity on the issue between our emails and Microsoft Outlook? Apparently its regarding the reputation list. Sent a support ticket but ive not had anything back. Not very helpful at all and its causing major problems with clients.

— Daniel Hogg (@HoggDan) September 6, 2020

@123regHelp @123reg I have been without email forwarding through our domain since Friday morning due to a glitch in your servers, can you please tell me when this will be resolved as I am loosing potential business by the minute now?? Also are the emails sent lost forever??

— rswsound.co.uk (@RSWSound) September 5, 2020

123 Reg is owned by the Host Europe Group, which is in turn owned by web hosting behemoth GoDaddy after a 2017 acquisition. This episode isn’t the first to befall the company’s email service, which had a major outage last year.

The Register has contacted Microsoft and 123-Reg for comment on what caused the outage, why, and when punters can expect normal service to resume. Nearly 24 hours ago, at 11:42am UK time yesterday, 123-Reg said that it was "confident that this service should return to normal soon". Soon, it seems, is a pretty long time. ®