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The URL of sandwich: Microsoft Office blogs redirect snafu foils users

A pox on your proxy, seethe Excel-wranglers

Microsoft's general one-stop URL for Office news and updates, blogs.office.com, is dead for some IP addresses in Europe and elsewhere in the world.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source close to Microsoft told The Register he accesses blog posts via subscriptions through Yammer and the broken link issue is definitely "annoying".

Blogs.office.com contains strategy, tips and news or feature updates concerning products such as Office 365, Outlook, Exchange, Sharepoint and Yammer, Redmond's enterprise social media service. It contains "Tier 1 announcements" for all audiences, rather than the more technical content and guidance Redmond's Tech Community Blogs provide.

On Monday, folks took to the Office 365 forums to complain that the longtime web address was redirecting to Microsoft's home page.

Ingeborg Hawighorst wrote: "None of my saved links to blog posts work anymore. The RSS feed last updated on Friday 29-Sep, but none of the links in the RSS messages work." Ivan Unger added: "They [Microsoft] could at least have warned us about this."

On Tuesday, Microsoft's Jeff Medford finally acknowledged the issue. "Hi All - the blog site is down right now, not planned, and we are working on it as we speak," he wrote.

In his next update later Tuesday, he wrote "should be back online now, sorry for the trouble!"

However, some users on Twitter and the forum are still having difficulties. From our desk in London, for example, blogs.office.com still redirects.

It appears that Microsoft's Tech Community for Office 365, "the one place where experts in the Microsoft community can share, collaborate on, and learn about Office 365 and other Microsoft products," is still reachable from London.

According to the geoscreenshot geocaching tool, both Frankfurt and Amsterdam IP addresses heading to blogs.office.com redirect to the homepage but San Francisco, California still correctly shows the Office blogs.

"Definitely seems like a geo issue, whether that's something in front of the site like DNS, CDN, load balancing, proxy, something like that perhaps," forum user Cian Allner suggested in a post.

We have contacted Microsoft for comment. ®

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