Microsoft Outlook is Down — What You Need to Know

Microsoft Outlook is Down — What You Need to Know

Outlook, Microsoft's email service for web, desktop, mobile, and Outlook.com, is experiencing outages worldwide, affecting users as of this writing.

Tom's Guide has not experienced any problems, but there are numerous reports of Outlook outages. Also, checking the DownDetector website, which tracks Internet service outages, it appears that Outlook is still having problems.

Microsoft's own Outlook support page states that some users may not be able to access their e-mail because the service is "having problems." With many people working from home, such outages will have a greater impact than ever before.

And Microsoft itself appears to be the culprit of this outage, as the company has made changes on its end that have disrupted Outlook.

"Upon further analysis, it was determined that this issue was caused by a recent configuration update to the component that routes user requests," Microsoft said. 'We have reverted the update and telemetry indicates that service has been restored.'

In short, Microsoft is fully aware of this outage and is working to fix it as soon as possible. If you are on the West Coast of the United States, in particular, you likely did not encounter this outage, as it occurred at 2:00 AM Pacific Standard Time, when many users are likely in bed.

"Our engineers are addressing the issue that affected some Microsoft 365 services," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge. 'As a result of the remedies we have implemented, the service is beginning to improve.'

If you're having problems accessing Outlook today, you'll just have to sit tight and wait for Microsoft to fix the problem. Especially given the size of Microsoft's engineering staff and the enormity of its cloud infrastructure, such outages tend not to last very long.

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