March Microsoft Madness: broken Exchange, broken Outlook, broken OneDrive for Business and inaccessible iOS mail.
Update: Microsoft updated these issues with how/why days afterwards. Most were caused by Microsoft Updates that hadn’t been tested properly. The outage in Canada and parts of eastern U.S. was caused by one network device going down, Microsoft has installed more redundancy in that system.
Foreboding February
February 26th some OneDrive for Business users discovered all their files were in read only mode as their license had expired. OneDrive produced an inaccurate message “You can’t edit your files because your license to use OneDrive ended over a month ago”.
According to Microsoft the message results from a Microsoft 365 admin misconfiguring permissions. No, really. This is from Service Health details for this problem.
But Microsoft was then able to fix problem (presumably without the help of those pesky M365 administrators who caused the problem) March 3rd.
Exchange Offline Saturday March 1st
Microsoft Exchange users worldwide were unable to access their email for several hours Saturday. And there were no updates in Service Health until after Microsoft fixed the problem.
Most attempts to access email from the browser earned multiple logins error 500. Outlook scored big logins errors too.
The impact spread to other Microsoft services however most of the calls I got Saturday were about the email offline.
iOS mail inaccessible March 2nd
Folks using the native iOS mail app to access Exchange Online had a maddening Sunday. Like the Exchange Offline Saturday, they kept getting login errors and requests to log in again.
One user sent me a screenshot with message that his iPhone wanted to use windows.net to log into their Exchange mail.
Microsoft still doesn’t know what is causing this problem. Microsoft rolled back an update but won’t know if it’s working until they reach out to a subset of affected users. I have clarified their explanation which you can read below.
Next update on this ongoing problem scheduled for March 4th 1:30pm PST. Link to follow updates on this issue here.
Now that the general Exchange problem is fixed I would recommend you download and try the Microsoft Outlook app to access email. Microsoft does a little more testing on its own apps before rolling out updates.
Monday March 3rd Microsoft Madness
The dust still not settled from the weekend, Microsoft greeted Canadian users Monday morning with another service issue. This time Microsoft 365 subscribers in Canada couldn’t access Exchange, Teams and the admin centre.
This time instead of blaming M365 admins, iOS mail app, Microsoft blamed unhealthy network infrastructure.
Given the start of Microsoft March Madness, I’m just filled with confidence about the upcoming Patch Tuesday March 11th. And Microsoft migrating from the M365 app to the M365 CoPilot app.
