Yesterday, multiple reports surfaced after a huge wave of spam emails managed to bypass Outlook and Hotmail spam filters, flooding users with Viagra ads and ads featuring Russian brides.
The issue began on the night between May 31 and June 1, 2016, and had slowly escalated until it reached the peak of annoyance by noon.
Angry users lined up to vent their anger on Reddit and Twitter, and Microsoft launched an incident response event on the Office 365 Server Status page to investigate the issues.
After a few hours, the company actually found that something was wrong and a quick patch to mitigate the spam problem, and later during the day a permanent solution was implemented to address the issue.
Microsoft 's status page shows that everything is normal for now, and a quick look at our Outlook inbox shows that the spam attack has stopped. Or at least it's hitting the Spam folder instead of the user's Inbox, as it should have in the first place.
Below is a screenshot of Microsoft's server status page along with all the details about this recent spam incident.
As a side note, the amount of spam has been on the rise recently. PhishMe reports have seen a 789 percent increase in phishing spam in the first three months of the year, while ESET and Proofpoint revealed they saw the biggest surge in spam in years in May 2016.
