Microsoft Emails The Fix To An Outlook Account Nobody Can Open

Microsoft has identified a promising route out of its prolonged service outage, provided the engineer responsible for restoring Outlook can get into Outlook to approve it.

The company said a recovery request had been sent to the correct inbox and was currently waiting for the sort of person who would normally have access to that inbox. That person was sitting in a conference room with eleven colleagues, refreshing a page that would not load.

“We’ve reached the approval stage, which is an important stage,” said incident coordinator Darren Bell, pointing to a small green tick beside the words Email successfully queued. “People keep asking whether the fix has been deployed. We need to distinguish between a fix and a request to be allowed to deploy a fix. The request is doing very well.”

The outage, which has disrupted Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services, has given the recovery team ample time to become familiar with the company’s recovery procedure. It begins with an email. If the email does not arrive, staff are advised to check their email.

Bell said an alternative approval route had been available through Teams. The team spent 24 minutes establishing that this was also a Microsoft product before moving it to the end of the whiteboard under Other Options. Someone suggested calling the approver directly, but the phone number was in his Outlook signature.

A printed emergency contact sheet was located in a cabinet near the kitchenette. Unfortunately, it contained the name of a man who left in 2022 and a QR code for the current version. The team scanned it anyway, on the basis that the printed sheet had been laminated and therefore probably knew what it was doing.

At one point, an engineer named Priya remembered the approver’s personal number. This was briefly considered a breakthrough. Security then asked how she had obtained it, whether the number had been entered into the approved contact system, and why she was retaining company information on a personal device. Priya said they had once ordered pizza. A separate incident was opened.

Meanwhile, customers have been reassured that the recovery effort remains the company’s highest priority. This designation allows the people working on it to skip several routine meetings, subject to their manager accepting the cancellations. Calendar invitations for an emergency status meeting have been sent to every member of the response team.

“We don’t want anybody making changes without visibility,” Bell explained. “If the people who can’t access email could access email, they would see how much visibility we’re providing.” He added that the outage had produced no reduction in the number of updates being written. Several were already sitting in the same unsent folder as the fix.

The engineer tasked with restoring access offered to walk across the building and ask for permission in person. Building access rejected his badge because the company had temporarily marked the affected service as unavailable. Facilities said this sounded like an IT problem. IT said he was already in the room.

By late afternoon, a colleague had located a working personal email account. The first test message arrived immediately, causing a small round of applause that stopped when compliance entered. Sending operational information outside the approved environment required an exception. The exception form promised a response within two business days and offered to email a copy of the submission.

Microsoft is now investigating whether the approval can be given verbally by an executive who has been briefed verbally by another executive who is authorized to hear it. The distinction matters because the first executive can authorize a recovery, but only the second can confirm that the first has attended the briefing. Both were on different calls.

Customers waiting to resume work have been encouraged to use the time productively. Suggested activities include preparing messages to send later, drafting apologies for messages they have not received, and checking whether the outage has ended by attempting the same action that failed three minutes ago.

Bell remained confident that the situation was close to resolution. The recovery email had now appeared in a preview notification on one employee’s phone, meaning the subject line was accessible to at least one human being.

“We can see that it says Action Required,” he said. “That’s exactly what we were hoping for.”