Starting Friday 24th November this year, it appears that Microsoft had been experiencing issues in relation with one of the most important day of the year in terms of sales for retailers.
It seems that Microsoft infrastructure has been struggling to cope with the high inbound traffic which was being received from retailers on Black Friday this year, and has been returned very odd SMTP responses:
“452 4.3.1 Insufficient system resources (ProcessorTime) [HE1EUR01HT046.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com] [HE1EUR01FT050.eop-EUR01.prod.protection.outlook.com]” while connected from xxxxxxxx (xxxxxxxxx) to hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com (104.47.0.33)
“451 4.4.0 Message failed to be made redundant due to A shadow copy was required but failed to be made with an AckStatus of Retry [VE1EUR02HT111.eop-EUR02.prod.protection.outlook.com] [VE1EUR02FT014.eop-EUR02.prod.protection.outlook.com]” while connected from xxxxxxx (xxxxxx) to hotmail-com.olc.protection.outlook.com (104.47.6.33)
The above listed SMTP responses seems to indicate that the related infrastructure has been experiencing issues with resources in terms of disk space.
Following the outage it has been experiencing in September this year impacting large part of its European users where most of them have been experiencing issues sending or receiving communications over a period of at least 12 hours, Microsoft is again showing that its infrastructure is far from being bulletproof and is showing its limitation.
It would be interesting to know how many users have decided to close down their accounts with Microsoft and move to another free webmail service such as Gmail.