Microsoft’s free email services Outlook.com and Hotmail suffered an outage across Europe on Monday, preventing users from sending and receiving emails for 12 hours.
The sites began returning error messages at 0720 GMT and continued to affect users across the region nearly 12 hours later, Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office 365 security site.
This is just the latest in a string of recent Microsoft outages to anger users for hours on end.
Microsoft’s free email services Outlook.com and Hotmail suffered an outage across Europe on Monday, preventing users from sending and receiving emails for 12 hours
Microsoft said it was working to resolve the glitch and would issue an update later on Monday on the status of its services.
‘We’re continuing to investigate to determine the source of the issue and to identify service recovery steps,’ the firm said.
It said the issue involved part of the company’s internet traffic load-balancing system which was gobbling up server capacity despite no apparent increase in user traffic.
Outage reports were concentrated in Western Europe and Britain, according to DownDetector.co.uk, an outage reporting site.
No other major Microsoft online services appeared to be affected.
Users immediately began noticing the outage after finding themselves unable to send or receive emails.
They took to Twitter to complain and ask if others were experiencing any issues.
Users across Britian and Western Europe were hit with this error message as they tried to use their account Monday
Users took to Twitter to vent their frustration, describing the delay as ridiculous
The topic began trending on the social media site in the UK as users were left wondering what was wrong for hours until Microsoft broke the silence on the massive outage hour later.
The firm eventually addressed the outage on its blog hours later.
On its service health website, it wrote: ‘We’ve identified that a subset of infrastructure was unable to process requests as expected, which caused general service availability to drop unexpectedly.’
‘We’ve redirected requests to alternate infrastructure to restore service, and we’re monitoring the environment while connectivity recovers.’
‘Additionally, we’re investigating an issue in which users are unable to send email messages.”
The meltdown triggered an explosion of activity on Twitter, with most users joking about the issue
It now reads: ‘There are currently no known issues preventing you from signing in to your Office 365 service health dashboard.’
Almost 10 hours after the email services first went dark, the official Outlook account tweeted, ‘We are aware of intermittent connectivity for some users in European countries and we’re working to resolve ASAP. Thanks for your patience.’
Many users used the opportunity to take aim at Microsoft’s email service
Many pointed out the service has been around far longer than many of its rivals
The firm then started replying to individual users who were tweeting about the outage to let them know the issue was in the midst of being repaired.
The outage also inspired a lot of jokes about how outdated Outlook and Hotmail, which is already a popular joke on the internet now that Gmail has become the new norm.
‘I realise now that this is my punishment for still using #Hotmail since 2000,’ one user wrote.
For many, the trending news of the outage was a reminder that the services exist.
Other internet commenters made jokes about the old services by tying in references to other sites and products now seen as outdated, such as Myspace and TK.
It has been a rough few months for Microsoft Outlook and Hotmail users, as the email platforms have gone dark a few times recently.
In March, they suffered a mammoth outage that caused havoc for thousands of email users.
There were widespread problems reported for users trying to access the email clients as well as Skype and Xbox Live.
One website which provides overview of outages had more than 3,600 reports.
Just two weeks later, users were hit with another similar outage.
For three hours in the prime of the afternoon, users couldn’t access Skype, Xbox Live, and other Office 365 services.
Independent website Down Detector, which provides real-time overview of issues and outages with all kinds of services, received almost 10,000 reports about the issue.