Microsoft Outlook is down — what you need to know

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Huge worldwide Outlook outage is Microsoft’s own fault

Microsoft Outlook
(Image credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Outlook email service for the web, desktop, mobile, and Outlook.com has been suffering outages worldwide, with users still being affected at the time of writing. 

While we've not experienced any problems on our end at Tom’s Guide, there are numerous reports of Outlook outages in effect. And checking on the DownDetector website, which tracks internet service outages, it appears that there are still problems with Outlook. 

Microsoft’s own support page for Outlook notes the service is “having issues” and that some users may be unable to access their email. At a time when a lot of people are working from home, such an outage is likely to be more impactful than ever. 

And it appears Microsoft itself is the culprit behind the outage as it made a change on the company’s side that has messed with Outlook. 

“Further analysis has determined that the issue is being caused by a recent configuration update to components that route user requests,” Microsoft said. “We've reverted the update and telemetry shows that the service is now recovering.” 

So Microsoft is well aware of the outage and is working to get it fixed as soon as possible. There's a good chance you might not have encountered the outage, especially if you’re on the West Coast of the U.S. as the outage happened at 2 a.m. PT, which is when we’d expect a large number of users to be asleep. 

“Our engineers are addressing an issue that affected some Microsoft 365 services,” a Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge. “Services are starting to improve as a result of the measures we have implemented.”

If you’ve encountered issues with getting access to Outlook today, then we’re afraid you’ll just have to sit tight and wait for Microsoft to fix the problem. Such outages tend not to last too long, especially given the size of Microsoft’s engineering workforce as well as the huge reach of its cloud infrastructure.

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.