(Resumed) Microsoft Incident : Small number of users are blocked from sending email to external recipients on 15 Dec

Microsoft issued an incident report on 15 Dec 2021 (Wed).

Users Affected CUHK Staff and Students
Start Time 15 Dec 2021 (Wed) 5:47PM
End Time 16 Dec 2021 (Wed) 1:00PM
Service Affected Small number of users are blocked from sending email to external recipients
Incident Details Small number of users are blocked from sending email to external recipients:
Users are blocked from sending email to external recipients.

More info:
Admins are experiencing delays in unblocking the users, which were previously blocked by Microsoft 365 Defender.Affected users may receive the error message: ‘550 5.1.8 Access denied, bad outbound sender AS(42003)’.

Users can send email to users within our organization as expected.

Final status:

Microsoft have completed the deployment of a fix to prevent this impact from occurring to additional users as well as unblocking all remaining mailboxes.

Scope of impact:
A small number of users that were previously blocked by Microsoft 365 Defender and were routed through the affected infrastructure may have been affected.

Root cause:
A code issue hindering users from being unblocked as expected, which was preventing some users from sending email to external recipients.

Next steps:
Microsoft are continuing their review of the impacting code to better identify and prevent similar impact in the future.

Status Restored

Last update by Microsoft: 17 Dec 2021 (Fri) 12:39 AM