It’s not just you: a bug may prevent you from sending emails from Outlook

If you can’t send emails from Outlook.com, rest easy. This doesn’t just happen to you. Microsoft explained that some users may encounter an error when trying send messages containing attachments.

Users affected by the Outlook outage are seeing errors such as “Error code 550 5.7.520 Message blocked”. The company has been recording this issue since at least Monday, November 6th. While they are working on the issue, he suggested as an alternative to sending files as a OneDrive link rather than attaching them.

Last July, Microsoft encountered another issue that caused a 401 exception error. This prevented Outlook.com users from searching for messages in their emails. In accordance with Computer beepingVictims have also had trouble contacting Microsoft 365 support and are therefore stuck in a loop of messages for Office 365 sign-in and service options.

At least two other outages affected the Outlook service in June. One of them restricted customers in the Americas from accessing their Exchange Online mailboxes via Outlook on the web. And the second reached Outlook.com, Azure Portal and OneDrive. Microsoft then explained that the suspension was caused by DDoS attacks, which were claimed by an attacker known as Anonymous Sudan.

How can I send files from Outlook while the outage lasts?

According to Microsoft’s explanation, the bug preventing emails from being sent from Outlook will only affect messages with attachments. If you don’t know how to send a file via a link, follow these instructions:

1. If the file is already on your OneDrive, select OneDrive.
2. If the file is not in OneDrive, select Download and Share.
3. Select the items you want to attach and select Share link.
4. You can also use Copy link from an Office or OneDrive file, or paste it into your email.

Other users have also reported another issue with sending, specifically, PDFs from any Microsoft domain: @hotmail.com, @live.com, @outlook.com, or @msn.com. In these cases, the email was apparently detected as spam and blocked from being sent. But the problem was already resolved on Tuesday morning.