Microsoft 365 Outage: Where's Your Email Going?

It's been a week for email issues! The good news is that Microsoft 365 email is mostly back to normal. Microsoft says service was restored at 12:20am on Saturday 14 November, New Zealand time.

Some emails that were sent to you during the outage may still trickle in over the next day or so, as Microsoft works through its backlog.

What's happening with Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365's email service, Exchange Online, went down at around 5:17am on Friday 13 November, New Zealand time. If your business uses Microsoft 365, you may not have been able to open existing emails, and new messages weren't turning up.

Microsoft says the problem started with an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade, which surfaced after a recent network change. It says it has fixed the underlying issue, and that there's no sign of a cyber attack. Microsoft has promised a full report on the cause once it's finished, and we'll pass on anything important from it. You can follow along on Microsoft's service health page.

Teams calls and chats kept mostly working during the outage.

Where did your email go?

If you're a Mint customer on Microsoft 365, we sorted this for you. As per our business continuity and disaster protocols, we switched your incoming email to our mail filter on Friday, so any emails sent to you wouldn't disappear before they could reach you.

Here's what happened:

When a customer emailed you, our mail filter caught it and held it.
It was still addressed to your usual email address.
On Saturday morning, once Microsoft 365 could accept mail again, we reverted the change, so mail now goes straight to your usual inbox.
We then delivered everything the filter had held. Expect it to have arrived in batches.

You didn't need to do anything. We're still watching the mail queue, and we'll update this page as things change.

What should you expect now?

Things are mostly back to normal, but a few things may take a little longer to settle:

Emails sent to you during the outage may still trickle in over the next day or so.
If you were expecting something that hasn't turned up, give it a day, then check with the sender or give us a call.
If anyone emailed you and got a bounce-back, it's worth asking them to resend it.

What about service credits?

Microsoft's service agreement lets customers claim a credit when its services are down for longer than it promises.

If Mint provides your Microsoft 365 licences, we'll apply for those credits on your behalf. You don't need to do anything, and we'll keep you updated on how the claim goes. Whether a credit is paid, and how much, is up to Microsoft, so we can't promise an amount. If your licences come from somewhere else, you'll need to claim through them.

We're here all weekend

Our emails are affected as well - and while we can access them, they're not being checked in the normal way. Please phone us if you need to talk. Someone will answer all weekend.

We'll be happy to assist - existing Mint Customer or not - to get you back online.