Microsoft still working to fix Exchange Online mailbox access issues

Covers an ongoing Exchange Online issue affecting mailbox access for Outlook users. It explains the root cause, Microsoft’s mitigation efforts, and why such cloud service disruptions can significantly impact business operations.

The incident was identified in the last week with Incident ID EX1256020. Initially Microsoft believed the source of this issue was the recent implementation of a “virtual” account (within the Exchange On-line environment).

However, after Microsoft indicated that the incident had been resolved on April 1, it appeared that the issues were continuing. As such, the incident was reopened, again tracked by incident ID #EX1268771, and confirms that there are continued disruptions to end-users.

A major obstacle in resolving this issue is its intermittent nature; therefore, depending upon when each end-user attempts to connect, they may be able to successfully connect into their mailbox versus experiencing a failure. The majority of the issues have been reported with:

• – Mobile versions of the Outlook application

• – New version of the Desktop version of Outlook for Mac

Microsoft Engineers are working towards mitigating these issues through restarting the Notification Broker Service throughout those portions of the affected infrastructures. In addition, Microsoft continues to investigate the root cause to ensure this does not occur again.

Microsoft did not provide information regarding how many users were impacted, nor what areas/regions were impacted. However, because Microsoft referred to this as an “incident,” it is likely that a large number of users experienced negative impacts from this incident.