Microsoft Outlook has been routing data to Japan for years

Microsoft Outlook has been routing data to Japan for years

By Abdullah Asim
Publication Date: 2026-02-03 04:45:00

Imagine that you set up an Outlook account where you let it autoconfigure the email settings for you, only for it to stall or run into an error. You’ll shrug it off and enter those details manually. However, in the background, Microsoft Outlook has just sent data to two addresses in Japan without anyone knowing.This is real and it has been happening since at least February of 2020.

Microsoft Outlook rerouting example.com traffic

A baffling new investigation has revealed that Microsoft’s Autodiscover has been erroneously bouncing around traffic meant for example.com to two real addresses in Japan. To put it more accurately, whenever Outlook would send requests to example.com, two servers in Japan would receive them instead. This is something that should never happen.That domain is reserved for documentation and testing, somewhere test requests are sent by developers so that they’re not part of real production traffic. It was…