Outlook down? Microsoft confirms issues with email service, but now there’s a fix

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If you logged in to work this morning and found that you can’t access your emails, don’t worry, it wasn’t you: Microsoft Outlook had a major outage today.

Thousands of users around the world reported issues with the email service, with complaints about failed launches, memory-intensive usage, and more.

Microsoft has found a solution and is urging users to refresh or restart their Outlook copy. You can read all the advice below…

Users started reporting problems with Microsoft Outlook around 9 a.m. ET, and the number of reports increased as more and more people logged in for work.

The latest figures from DownDetector, the outage tracking site, show a sharp spike in the number of reports throughout the day.

Microsoft has acknowledged the issue and says it is trying to replicate it internally to find out more…

It was initially thought the issue would only affect users in Europe (Microsoft’s own tweet even mentions this) – but as this DownDetector heat map shows, it’s now spreading across the US as people log in to work that day.

Reports have now crossed the 2,000 mark, meaning it continues to grow – we’re still waiting for the latest update from Microsoft though…

The end may be in sight: we see a slight decrease in the number of reports, and complaints on Twitter are certainly decreasing…

However, it appears that Microsoft itself is still struggling to find a concrete solution, with the latest tweet stating that it is “focused” on trying to find out what went wrong…

Maybe we finally have a breakthrough!

Microsoft says it’s about to roll out a possible fix, after hopefully identifying the problem – let’s see how this goes…

We have a solution! Microsoft has confirmed that it has a fix and users will need to restart or refresh their Outlook sessions – hopefully this works.

The initial feedback looks good, and the number of outages on DownDetector is dropping, so this could be the end of the Outlook outage. If you are still having problems, please message us at [email protected]. We’ll remain vigilant for a while to see if anything else happens!