Microsoft 365 Alert – Service Degradation – Exchange Online – Users may receive a “cannot create folder” message when creating public folders in the Outlook desktop client – RESOLVED

12/10/2023 08:39:00 AM 

NHSmail Reference : INC38827831

Microsoft Reference : EX680770/EX681233

Issue Status : RESOLVED

Issue Description : Users may receive a “cannot create folder” message when creating public folders in the Outlook desktop client.

More info : Users are incorrectly presented with this error, as the folder is successfully created after a few seconds.

Final Update : 18/10/2023 16:55:00 PM – Following Microsoft’s completed fix deployment, which reverted the update that introduced this problem, their internal service telemetry confirms that impact has been remediated.

Scope of impact : Any user may receive a message stating “cannot create the folder” when creating public folders in the Outlook desktop client.

Root cause : A recent update, intended to optimize mailbox folder hierarchy syncing, exacerbated a corruption within the process by which primary and secondary mailboxes were synced, leading to impact.

Next steps : Microsoft are further analyzing the offending service update along with the introduced corruption so they can help identify similar issues during their testing and validation processes and before impact can be produced.
Microsoft are assessing the methods they utilize in observing and validating the progress of their deployments implemented over a broad scale of service infrastructure, which they will use for identifying methods for more precisely determining and communicating when a service impact ceases.