Microsoft's change broke the Exchange admin console. SharePoint failed that way in September.
From mid-morning European time on 12 October, administrators of Microsoft's Exchange Online, its cloud email service, could not open the Exchange admin center, The Register reported.
That is the console where they manage mailboxes and mail rules. They saw an "Internal Server Error" message, and Microsoft offered no workaround during the incident.
Microsoft said a recent configuration change to the console made it send back unexpected responses, "preventing admins from successfully accessing the EAC", the admin center. Reverting the change restored access, it said.
The Register lists earlier outages traced to configuration changes, including SharePoint Online in September and Outlook for iOS in April. It also lists a wider Microsoft 365 outage in August 2025.
The reported failure was in the admin console. The report does not say that email stopped. Mail may keep flowing while admins lose the screen they use to fix it. In each outage on that list, the change was made inside Microsoft, outside any customer's change process.
Has your team tested which admin tasks it can still do when the Exchange admin center is down?
Image: AI-generated.
Sources
Our file on Microsoft
- 13 Oct
Microsoft promised $100m for its Africa engineering centre. Staff say Nairobi's is closing.
- 12 Oct
Microsoft's CEO told firms to treat AI as risky insiders. Keep an off switch.
- 11 Oct
Microsoft's new business AI runs on Alibaba's Chinese model. Its own comes later.
- 11 Oct
Fujitsu gave 100,000 staff Copilot. AI now handles about 75% of help desk triage.
- 10 Oct
Microsoft 365 families will lose up to 4 TB. Microsoft calls it flexible.
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