Microsoft Outlook Outage – Overview, Solutions, and Preventive Measures

Earlier this month, on June 5, 2023, thousands of Outlook users faced issues with the email service where they were unable to use the Outlook client. While trying to access the email service, they encountered only black screens and an error message that read, “Service Unavailable. HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.”

DownDetector – a website that observes online outages, said that the issue has mainly impacted the Microsoft’s emailing service. However, the outage has also affected those who’re using the Outlook desktop application.

Microsoft, via its Microsoft 365 Status account on Twitter, accepted that there is an issue while accessing Outlook on the web. The company said that it has also identified a “downstream impact” for Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint Online. Microsoft 365 Status later posted that the company had reverted an update and observed improvement in the services after confirming the recovery for affected services.

After investigating the cause of the outage, Microsoft has recently said in its blog post that the cause of outage was a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. It is a kind of cyberattack wherein the attackers try to disturb the normal traffic of a service, server, or network by overwhelming the targeted system or its surrounding environment with internet traffic.

The company has identified surges in the traffic against some services, temporarily impacting the availability. It confirmed that a group named Anonymous Sudan was behind the DDoS attack. The company added that the DDoS attackers mainly targeted the Layer 7 not Layer 3 or 4. It further added that the company has hardened the Layer 7 protections that include tuning the Azure Web Application Firewall (WAF) for better protecting the customers from similar DDoS attacks.

On June 20^th, there was a similar outage for users in Western Europe, as they were unable to access files within the M365 service. Microsoft identified the issue as a problem in a datacenter in Germany that was not performing at optimal performance thresholds. The issue has been fixed for now, but there’s no guarantee that it will not come up in the future.

Some Possible Solutions

Microsoft has already identified the cause and is working to permanently fix it. It also said that the outage is due to a duplicate contact list issue in Teams and Outlook. This issue impacted those users who have synced their personal account device contacts with Microsoft Teams.

If you’ve been impacted with the issue, then you can try the following solutions and workarounds to resolve the problem.

Delete the Device Contacts

The workaround to this problem, as suggested by Microsoft, is to delete the device contacts sub-folder. The steps to delete this folder are:

• Go to Teams on your device.
• Click on your Profile and navigate to Settings and People.
• Toggle the “Sync my device contacts” to turn off the sync.
• The device contacts will be deleted in a few days.

Use ContactsCleanup.exe

When this issue occurred for the first time, Microsoft released a Windows HotFix for the duplicate contacts problem in Outlook. It released a utility called ContactsCleanup.exe to remove the contacts folder synced by Teams.

You can download this tool and run the .exe file. Enter your Microsoft Outlook email ID and select Yes, when the app prompts you for access. In the Command window, enter “1” and press Enter to start the cleanup process. If you use Teams on more than one mobile device, select the number. Once the cleanup is completed, press any key to close the app.

How to protect yourself from such outages?

While the above solutions could work temporarily, similar problems can recur in the future. Unfortunately, this is the seventh outage for Microsoft Outlook and Teams this year. So, it is important to protect yourself from such outages and ensure that you have continued access to your emails and data. Here are some suggestions and best practices you can follow to mitigate the impact of such outages and issues.

Regular Backup

Make sure you take regular backups of your Outlook and Microsoft Office data. Depending on your backup schedule, you may lose some recent data but you should have most of what you need to continue working.

Keep Outlook Updated

Microsoft releases hotfixes and patches from time to time. Follow them closely and keep your application updated. Also, consider installing antivirus software to protect the system from malware and ransomware attacks.

Keep Some Third-Party Tools in Hand

Sometimes, such outages and cyberattacks may impact the data files, making them inaccessible. If your Outlook data file, such as OST, becomes inaccessible, then you lose access to your mailbox data. So, you can keep third-party tools, like Stellar Converter for OST, in your arsenal. This tool helps to extract mailbox items from inaccessible or orphaned OST files and save them to PST that you can easily import into your Outlook.

Bottom Line

Though Microsoft has been analyzing the telemetric data and working on finding a permanent solution, there’s no doubt that this outage has impacted a lot of users. Given that such outages may also occur in future, it is suggested to take measures to protect yourself, like taking regular backups, keeping your app up-to-date, following important updates, and keeping tools like Stellar Converter for OST in hand.

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About The Author

Shelly Bhardwaj

I am a Product Consultant and is associated with Stellar Data Recovery from last 8 years. I write about the latest technology tips and provide custom solutions related to Exchange Server, Office 365, MS Outlook, and many other Email Clients & different flavors of OS Servers. Read More