On the night of February 20-21, 2023, Outlook users were plagued by numerous spam emails and other scams, which got mixed up with their messages in their inbox. The cause: a failure of the spam filter.
Outlook users had the unpleasant surprise, Monday, February 20, to discover dozens of e-mails about contests, parcel deliveries, medical appointments, subscriptions to renew and other tempting offers in their inbox. Indeed, Microsoft’s email suffered a technical crash that lasted more than nine hours worldwide and prevented spam from being redirected to junk mail thanks to the spam filter. As a result, users have seen a wave of fraudulent mails land in their main inbox, mixing with legitimate mails. Enough to complicate sorting and be assailed by incessant notifications! The problem is that this outage exposed them to numerous scams, phishing attempts, and other scams of all kinds.
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Fortunately, things returned to normal on Tuesday February 21, as indicated a activity page Microsoft services, without the company giving more information on the reasons for this failure. “We have identified the source of the issue and taken steps to resolve it. We will continue to monitor to ensure the issue remains mitigated”said a spokesperson, quoted by BFM-TV. It is possible that some spam still remains in inboxes despite the return of the spam filter.
This isn’t the first time that Microsoft’s e-mail system has experienced some problems. Already in January, a huge outage affected many of the company’s services due to a network configuration problem, followed by another Outlook outage on February 7, which prevented users from sending, receiving or to search for e-mails because of a “recent change”. AT when the next?