Users of Microsoft's Outlook.com have been flooded with spam and phishing emails over a period of 12 hours. It seems that the message filters for the email service suffered an outage, resulting inboxes being overwhelmed with junk mail.
While Microsoft says that the issue has now been addressed, the company has provided very little in the way of explanation for what happened.
The service status page for Outlook.com now indicates that "everything is up and running", but the status history reveals just a bit about what has been going on.
Microsoft only provided two status updates during the spam filter outage, with the first saying:
Title: Some users may see spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes
User impact: Users may see spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes.
More info: Affected users may see performance issues such as navigation delays and messaging latency in Outlook.com or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) connections.
Current status: We're analyzing system logs to isolate the origin of this issue and reviewing options to remediate the impact.
Next update by: Monday, February 20, 2023, at 7:00 PM UTC
The most recent, posted when the problem had been addressed, reads:
Title: Some users may see spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes
User impact: Users may have seen spam and phish email messages being delivered to their inboxes.
More info: Affected users may have seen performance issues such as navigation delays and messaging latency in Outlook.com or Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) connections.
Final status: We've identified the source of the problem and taken action to fix it. Our service telemetry shows that the problem has been addressed, and we'll continue to monitor this telemetry to ensure the issue remains mitigated.
Start time: Monday, February 20, 2023, at 5:00 AM UTC
End time: Monday, February 20, 2023, at 5:55 PM UTC
This is the final update for the event.
The near-radio silence from Microsoft about the problem -- which affected a large but unknown number of people -- has irritated many. There were numerous complaints on Twitter when the issue reared is head, and the company only responded to tweets when the issue was resolved:
Hi there, thanks for reaching out. We apologize for any inconvenience this caused. The issue has been resolved. If you are still experiencing issues, please DM us for assistance. https://t.co/IUcFK9Ejgw
— Microsoft Outlook (@Outlook) February 20, 2023
While the issue may be fixed, anyone who does not check their email frequently may still be astonished to find a mountain of spam waiting for them when they do access their inboxes.
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