Office 365 Email Outage Update

The University of Chicago experienced an issue that prevented members of our community from accessing email between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Sunday, March 31. The temporary outage was due to an unexpected software problem, and email services were restored by Sunday evening.  

During the outage, any email sent to the affected email accounts may not have been delivered and may need to be re-sent by the sender. In addition, any impacted accounts with email forwarding enabled from Microsoft Office 365 (i.e., to Gmail, BSD, Booth, etc.) did not have messages forwarded during the period of the outage. Some users trying to access Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook may receive the following error message: "Error: 403 Forbidden."  Please visit 403 Forbidden Error - Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, etc.) for guidance on this issue.

In addition, some users affected by the outage may also need to reconfigure their mobile devices - please see Set Up Outlook Email on iOS Devices and Set Up Outlook Email on Android Devices.

While outages like this are rare, IT Services is committed to taking steps to minimize this situation from happening again in the future.

For additional assistance, please contact IT Services Support.