On January 6th, 2021, at approximately 09:00 UTC, an issue with the mail flow was identified. As a result, email traffic would work intermittently with no particular pattern that could indicate an internal issue, causing a delay in the email delivery. The issue was fixed at 10:00 UTC, and it took around 2 hours to process the backlog of messages generated throughout the incident.
Further investigation showed that the issue was caused by a failure in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure. The technical responses we have received from their servers have been "Temporarily unable to process your email. Please try again later
" and "Mail sent to the wrong Office 365 region
".
After highlighting the problem, Microsoft investigated and found a routing issue towards Denmark, which is where Dualog’s primary services are hosted. The result was that email traffic to and from ships, towards an O365 counterpart, would be affected, creating a delay. We applied several workarounds to ensure the messages would flow accordingly. Microsoft finally resolved the issue on January 7th at 14:00 UTC.
Our IT Infrastructure team has taken the necessary precaution to monitor this type of incident and avoid its occurrence in the future. We do apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused to your daily operations.