[German]Since six days (March 1, 2025), Microsoft's cloud services have been rumbling. Outlook, the Microsoft 365 services and Exchange Online have been disrupted again and again. As of March 6, 2025, I have received further reports from readers that Outlook.com is down and can also see this in error messages on the Android smartphone, where Thunderbird cannot reach a test mailbox at outlook.com. However, Microsoft states that only iOS is affected.
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Reader notification about outlook.com outage
A blog reader sent me a personal message on BlueSky about a malfunction in Outlook (thanks for that). On Downdetector, I received the following notification on March 6, 2025.
There were a number of fault reports at around 16:00. This also corresponds with the displays on the smartphone, which appeared around 3 p.m. On allestoerungen.de, disruptions are reported as early as 10 a.m. on March 6, 2025, although the volume of disruption reports is not very high.
I queried the Office status page on March 6, 2025 around 11:00 pm and got the display from the picture above. It confirms issues with outlook.com. The details state that users may no longer be able to access their email via the native mail app on iOS devices. Microsoft states that they are investigating the underlying issue which is impacting users trying to access their email using the native mail app on iOS devices.
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However, this message was published on March 5, 2025 at around 4:00 a.m. (UTC), i.e. in the morning hours. In the meantime, this message has been repeated several times – the last entry is dated March 6, 2025, 23:00 (UTC).
I came across the above tweet on X, where someone shows an error message on March 4, 2025. At the same time, the person concerned states that they have not had access to their emails since Saturday, March 1, 2025.
What is the root cause?
At this point, the interested contemporary asks himself the question of what can be so broken at Microsoft that the entire cloud has been rumbling for a week and there are repeated worldwide outages.
In its first incident reports, Microsoft stated that an accidental update was the reason for the disruption on March 1, 2025. However, countermeasures have been initiated and a post-incident report will be submitted at a later date.
The day before yesterday I explicitly asked the press department of Microsoft Germany for a post-incident report, but there is silence in the forest. On the other hand, I am aware of observations from various users in this environment.
There are reports from various sources that some Outlook mailboxes (which are located under Exchange Online, even if it says outlook.com) have been observed to be flooded with messages in the junk folders before March 1, 2025. As soon as the quotas are reached, nothing works for these tenants/mailboxes. If other admins receive such notifications or have made similar observations, they can leave a comment.
And on Facebook, I received the above German reader comment from a German IT service provider on March 4, 2025, which states that Exchange Online is no longer sending mails to its customers. The reason given by these customers is "The mailbox doesn't exist". This fits in with what I have also heard from several other sources (mailboxes on the tenants are suddenly gone, which administrators should see in the Admin Center).
Now it will be interesting for me to see if and when Microsoft gets to grips with the problem and publishes a Post Incident Report that reveals certain things (e.g. how it can be that certain mailboxes on different tenants are suddenly gone) – or whether they are stonewalling and want to keep the causes of the incident under wraps.
I have already written an article about an incident and I am coordinating it with my unnamed sources. Then Microsoft gets the opportunity to comment before the article goes online. Not very nice what I was told from my sources.
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