Kevin Crawley
Author's posts
Oct 28 2025
Email delays – Microsoft Schools
For approximately a week, lots of schools that use Microsoft as their email provider, have experienced delays with their emails being delivered. This has impacted schools that use different IT Support companies/different ISPs/different DNS providers meaning this is not limited to HFL/RM managed schools. We are unsure what has specifically changed at Microsoft’s end and to the best of my knowledge there has been no communication from Microsoft on any changes they have made.
It looks likes Microsoft no longer support MX Records that have all the digits at the end of it – an example being: 1215491040.mail.outlook.com.
We believe that Microsoft MX Records now need to be in this format: schoolname-herts-sch-uk.mail.protection.outlook.com
Today, RM made a bulk DNS change impacting 24 schools and we received positive feedback from these schools, that their emails were once again being sent/received promptly. With this in mind, over the next couple of days, RM will bulk update the MX Records for all HFL Broadband schools that have the unsupported format, over to the correct format.
If anyone has any queries about this, please get in touch with me or the HFL Service Desk.
Thanks, Kev (kevin.crawley@hfleducation.org)
Oct 24 2025
Email issues
This isn’t Broadband related, but as our Service Desk are receiving lot of queries on this, I thought that it might be helpful to send a communication out. There is a network wide ongoing Microsoft issue where schools and other organisations are experiencing difficulties receiving emails.
Microsoft are actively investigating this issue.
Oct 21 2025
SafetyNet Go issues
RM have now added this issue to their status page. I would recommend registering for updates there: https://status.rm.com/
It is a wider issue and RM are treating this as a P1 incident. In the meantime, removing the SafetyNet Go extension will resolve this. Hopefully a fix will be deployed shortly and the extension can then be added again.
Oct 21 2025
Internet issues
We have received a handful of reports where schools cannot access the internet. It appears to be connected to schools that use the SafetyNet Go extension. RM are investigating. Apologies for the inconvenience.
Sep 30 2025
HFL Support
Please note that the support process for HFL Broadband queries has recently changed recently and there is a new email address to use. Broadband support queries are now being handled by the Technology in Schools Service Desk. To ensure all future queries are dealt with correctly, please log new tickets to:
Sep 25 2025
Google errors… again
Yesterday, I reported that internet sessions to Google’s server 142.250.117.95 were returning errors for Chromebook users. This was because the Google server has an out of date SSL Certificate. RM disabled certificate inspection for the traffic to that IP address, and reported the issue to Google. We were hoping that would stop the disruption that schools were experiencing. However, there have been a further reports of problems today. On investigation there are other Google IP servers with an expired SSL Certificate. As new Google IPs, come to light, RM will continue to fix individual IPs. We really need Google to fix the root cause and RM are actively chasing them to do so.
I’d like to apologise for the disruption once again but we are looking for Google to make changes at their end to fix this properly, once and for all. In the meantime, RM will put the workaround in place for specific Google IPs as they come to light.
Thanks, Kev