EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

Microsoft 365 users saw emails incorrectly labeled as junk mail on Thursday morning. “We’re investigating an issue in which email is being sent to the junk folder. We’ll be providing updates under EX258373 in the admin center,” reported Microsoft via Twitter.

Roughly sixty minutes later, Microsoft tweeted that the confusion correlated with a change it had made. The company intended to move quickly in addressing the issue.

“We’re reverting a change that has caused inbound email…[to route] to the junk folder. Additional information can be found in the admin center under EX258373,” the company tweeted.

“We’ve reverted the change and observed successful email delivery. We’re now reprocessing any emails…incorrectly delivered as junk. More info…[available via] the admin center under EX258373,” stated a subsequent update.

Inconsistencies with Office 365 performance began around 12 hours before. At that point, Microsoft reported investigation of an issue around email forwarding. All in all, users could not forward emails using Exchange Online.

“We determined that a recently deployed spam rule is causing impact,” stated Microsoft, on Wednesday evening. “We’ve prepared a fix and are deploying it to the affected infrastructure. For more details, please visit the admin center.” Around midnight, the account deemed the issue resolved.

Email still going to junk mail

The issue no longer persists, but your email may still route itself to your junk mail folder.  If this appears as the case for you, consider marking your emails as ‘not junk’ or adding certain senders to your ‘Safe Senders’ list. In addition, demarcating email as ‘Not Junk’ also enables Microsoft to improve services.

Mail 365

In March, Microsoft also experienced an outage. At that point, users remained unable to log into accounts due to an Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) configuration issue. Multiple Microsoft services also stopped functioning. These included Xbox Live, Intune, Outlook.com, Office Web, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business and Yammer, among others.

In September, another worldwide outage affected the company. This one disrupted services such as Microsoft Teams, Office.com, Power Platform and Dynamics365.

For more on this story, visit ZDNet. In addition, see more Microsoft stories here and here. How can you can get the latest O365 information in one simple spot? Sign up for the Cyber Talk newsletter.

Image courtesy of bleepingcomputer.com.