Update: 4:14 pm Eastern time - Microsoft has now fixed the problem with searching emails in Outlook on the web. The company stated:
Our further analysis into the 401 exception errors has identified a recent service update which had introduced a configuration issue that prevented users' keyword searches in Outlook.com. After reverting the offending service update, we've validated that impact has been remediated.
Original story - Microsoft is suffering from yet another issue with its online productivity apps. This time, it's with its Outlook email client, and more specifically with the web version at Outlook.com.
At the moment, people who access Outlook.com cannot search their emails. The issue was first reported on Microsoft's service status page (via BleepingComputer) over 12 hours ago.
The status page currently says:
Title: Users can't search using keywords in Outlook.com
User impact: Users can't search using keywords in Outlook.com.
More info: When attempting to search, users receive an error which states "Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later."
Current status: We're continuing to investigate into the 401 exception errors to confirm the source generating these errors and determine a plan to remediate impact.
People who use the mobile Outlook email apps are reportedly not being affected by this issue at this time. The Microsoft status page says it will have an update on this situation at 7:30 PM UTC (3:30 PM EST). We will update this story when this issue has been resolved.
This is just the latest issue that has hit Outlook web users in recent days. Last week, on June 27, the Outlook.com site was inaccessible for many users worldwide for a number of hours before a fix was enabled.
During the first week of June, there was an even more serious outage that affected nearly all of Microsoft's online services, including Teams, Azure, and Outlook. The problem lasted for about 15 hours. Later, the company admitted the outage was due to an extensive denial of service attack on its systems.
While it's unlikely that a DDoS attack is at the heart of this latest issue with Outlook.com it does show that Microsoft is having many more issues with its web-based email client than what many would consider to be expected amounts of errors and downtime.
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