Apple Support Outage on 04/26/21 - Emails Hard Bounced

Kristi Kolpanen

We just discovered this issue on our end as part of re-activating an individual’s “Invalid Account” email in BBIS, and as I did not see anything related to this currently posted, I thought I would share in case anyone else was unaware.

Apple – Support appears to have had an outage back on 04/26/21, and as a result, an email that we sent out during that time via BBIS appears to have hard bounced on email addresses ending in @mac.com, @me.com, and @icloud.com. As a result, all 447 of these email accounts were flagged as hard bounce with a message similar to “550 5.1.1 <example_email@icloud.com>: user lookup success but no user record found”.

We are going to have to go through manually and re-validate these accounts in BBIS (unless anyone has a recommendation on how to do this via mass update, but my understanding is this is a one-by-one manual look-up via BBIS Invalid Account and change). You might check you bounces on any email communications sent out on 04/26/21 to see if you encountered this same Apple outage issue with email recipients.

Simon Watson

Hi Kristi.

We had a similar issue with a large number of internal addresses bouncing on a specific mail out, however they are valid and so they need to be removed from the invalid list.

Did you find a bulk method? Or was it just manually removing each one?

Thanks. Simon.

Kristi Kolpanen

Hi, Simon.

Unfortunately, we did not discover a way to update via bulk, so we had to update one-by-one.