• by Ray Schultz , January 30, 2019

Both Gmail and Microsoft Office 365 have suffered service outages affecting email users in the last two days.

Office 365 was down on Wednesday in the UK and parts of Europe, with 32% of the complaints posted on downdetector specifying problems with Outlook.

Some problems are hitting users in the U.S.

One Arkansas student wrote: “can login to Office 365 OWA (Exchange Webmail) and see new messages but they will not load the text.” 

Microsoft posted this explanation, according to a comment on downdetector:

“Reason why DNS change may be helping:Preliminary root cause: A portion of third-party managed network infrastructure that facilitates authentication requests is degraded, affecting access to one or more Microsoft 365 services.

“Current status: We've moved services to an alternate network provider and performed numerous targeted service restarts. Our telemetry indicates that service availability has improved significantly and most authentication requests are succeeding; however, we still are observing residual impact to some services.”

Bleeping Computer concludes that "the issue most probably stems from the ATP Safe Links feature which is designed to scan "web addresses (URLs) in email messages" and to provide "time-of-click verification of web addresses (URLs) in email messages."

Meanwhile, Gmail began having issues starting shortly after 6 a.m. EST on Tuesday. 

Of comments coming in to downdetector, 41% were for log-in, 33% said related to receiving messages and 18% related to a website. 

The outage was global, with service down in the UK, Australia, Brazil, Norway and India, according to the Standard.

Google’s G Suite Status Dashboard confirms that there were issues affecting a range of Google services, including Calendar, Drive and Docs, on Tuesday. But there were no issues indicated on Wednesday.

However, comments posted on downdetector Wednesday morning reflect continuing problems for some account holders. 

“an hour ago No new email messages from gmail since yesterday,” writes one.      

“2 hours ago Gmail app on Android phone crashes,” another adds.

“Cannot get mail Using iPhone and mail app The mail server “imap gmail” is not responding,” another user writes.