User impact: Admins couldn’t release some quarantined email messages within Microsoft 365 Defender portal. 

Final status: After updating the problematic setting configuration that were made by the offending service update, we’ve confirmed that quarantined email messages within the Microsoft 365 portal are able to be released and that impact has been remediated. 

Scope of impact: Any admin attempting to release email messages from the Microsoft 365 Defender portal’s quarantine release section was affected. 

Start time: Tuesday, February 14, 2023, at 8:06 AM UTC

End time: Wednesday, March 8, 2023, at 10:30 PM UTC

Root cause: A service update that was intending to improve our email quarantine processes had resulted in impact.

Next steps:
– We’re further analyzing the offending service update to better understand why it resulted in impact so we can help to identify similar issues during our validation and testing processes and before they’re able to produce impact.

This is the final update for this event.