HomeWinBuzzer NewsMicrosoft Quickly Fixes Outlook.com Spam Flood

Microsoft Quickly Fixes Outlook.com Spam Flood

Outlook.com users were hit by huge waves of spam yesterday, but Microsoft quickly solved the problem, although did not say what caused it.

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Tuesday was a frustrating day for many users as the service went into a spam meltdown, although it is not clear if this was the case for everyone. Nevertheless, the majority of Outlook.com users reported that their inboxes were overloaded with spam, leaving scrambling for a fix.

It is not clear at this point what caused the spam filters to be down, but according to the current service status for Outlook.com, the issue has been solved.

Yesterday it was a different matter as many users thought it was a problem at their end, with most reporting dozens of spam emails. Other showed that they would be deleting a batch of dozens of spam when dozens more would appear in their inboxes. It is unclear where the spam content was coming from.

Outlook-Status-Microsoft-Office

In the case of yours truly, most of the spams had a reference to my username within the title or subject of the spam mail. This meant it was an easy case of searching a single term and deleting the spam in one chunk, but others report that deleting the emails took a long time. Microsoft acknowledged the issue and said it was solving it:

We're implementing two fixes. One will provide short-term relief preventing spam reaching your inbox. The second will be a longer term fix which should stop spam reaching our infrastructure.

As mentioned, the problem has now been fixed, but the Outlook team did not give any details on the cause of the issue or whether it could happen again.

SourceCNET
Luke Jones
Luke Jones
Luke has been writing about all things tech for more than five years. He is following Microsoft closely to bring you the latest news about Windows, Office, Azure, Skype, HoloLens and all the rest of their products.

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