Microsoft has fixed a fault with its Outlook and Hotmail spam filters, which recenlty hit users with waves of spam emails.
The company confirmed the problem earlier this week with a vague message on its Service Status page: "Some users may be receiving excessive spam mail."
The company has since issued an update claiming that the problem is solved: "We’ve implemented the fixes throughout the affected infrastructure, which has mitigated impact."
Microsoft implemented two fixes, with the first providing short-term relief preventing spam reaching users’ inboxes. The second is a longer-term fix which the company said should stop spam reaching its infrastructure.
Several affected users had complained about the issue on social media, complaining that huge quantities of junk mail had hit their inboxes.
Ben Nelson tweeted, "Getting a spam/junk email about every minute into my main inbox." Another user Jennifer Roseblade said: "Drowning in junk mail."
Microsoft did not confirm the cause of the problem, but the process of migrating all its email servers to the Office 365 cloud may potentially be one of the causes.
The company has faced several outages in the past few years. Last year, a phishing campaign targeted users of Outlook.com, potentially affecting the 400 million users who used the free email service.
In 2013, Outlook and Hotmail users faced difficulties in using the services due to a lenghty outage.
Last month, a Russian hacker stolen the details of millions of hacked email accounts including those from Hotmail, Google Gmail, and Yahoo Mail.
Microsoft upgraded all Hotmail customers to Outlook.com in 2013, although many people still retain @hotmail email addresses.
