Failing Expectations: The door is open to spam and phishing

On the night of February 20-21, 2023, Outlook users were infected with numerous spam emails and other scams, which got mixed up with their messages in their inbox. Reason: a breakdown of the spam filter.

And so Outlook users had the nasty surprise, Monday, February 20, to discover dozens of emails about contests, package deliveries, medical appointments, subscriptions for renewal, and other tempting offers in their inbox. In fact, Microsoft Mail suffered a technical failure that lasted more than nine hours worldwide and prevented spam from being forwarded in junk mail thanks to a spam filter. As a result, users saw a wave of fraudulent messages land in their main inbox, mixed in with legitimate mail. Enough to complicate the sorting and get you constantly bombarded with notifications! The problem is that this failure has exposed them to many scams, phishing attempts, and other scams of all kinds.

Fortunately, things returned to normal on Tuesday, February 21, as indicated by Microsoft’s services activity page, without the company providing more information about the reasons for the outage. We have identified the source of the problem and are taking steps to resolve it. “We will continue to monitor to ensure the issue persists,” a spokesperson for the software giant said. However, it is possible for some spam to remain in the inbox even though the spam filter is back.

This isn’t the first time that Microsoft email has encountered some issues. Already in January, a major outage affected many departments of the company due to a network configuration problem, followed by another outage in Outlook on February 7, which prevented users from sending, receiving or searching for emails due to a “recent change”.