Microsoft’s Outlook email service hit by outage

21 June 2022, 17:04

A screenshot of the Microsoft Outlook email service
Outlook. Picture: PA

The company said some users may be unable to access their mailboxes, and send or receive messages.

Microsoft’s Outlook email platform is continuing to face problems for some users, after being hit by service issues earlier on Tuesday, which knocked the service offline for some.

The company has confirmed the problem and said it is working to fix it, with no other services currently appearing to be affected, but said some Outlook users continued to be impacted several hours later.

According to Microsoft’s own service status website, some Outlook users “may be unable to access their mailboxes via any connection method” and may encounter “delays sending, receiving or accessing email messages”.

In its most recent update on the site, Microsoft said it now planned to restart the infrastructure causing the problem in an attempt to fully rectify the issue.

“We’re continuing to see improvement in service availability, but some users are still experiencing impact,” Microsoft said.

“We’re restarting the infrastructure that serves user requests, to resolve the remaining impact and fully restore service.”

The company also confirmed that the issue was no longer specific to some users in Europe, but was affecting people around the world.

Earlier, the company said it had identified the source of the issue, which was its “traffic management infrastructure”, which Microsoft said was “not working as expected”.

The firm said it had “successfully routed traffic to an alternate traffic management method”, which had improved service, but some users continue to be affected.

According to the website monitoring service Down Detector, affected users said they were seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from a range of devices.

The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems at about 9am on Tuesday, but reported issues in the UK had dropped substantially by late Tuesday.

The outage appears to be unrelated to an issue at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare, which took a large number of popular websites offline earlier on Tuesday.

Cloudflare said the problem has now been resolved.

By Press Association

More Technology News

See more More Technology News

Microsoft surface tablets

Microsoft outage still causing ‘lingering issues’ with email

The Google logon on the screen of a smartphone

Google faces £7 billion legal claim over search engine advertising

Hands on a laptop

Estimated 7m UK adults own cryptoassets, says FCA

A teenager uses his mobile phone to access social media,

Social media users ‘won’t be forced to share personal details after child ban’

Google Antitrust Remedies

US regulators seek to break up Google and force Chrome sale

Jim Chalmers gestures

Australian government rejects Musk’s claim it plans to control internet access

Graphs showing outages across Microsoft

Microsoft outage hits Teams and Outlook users

A person holds an iphone showing the app for Google chrome search engine

Apple and Google ‘should face investigation over mobile browser duopoly’

UK unveils AI cyber defence lab to combat Russian threats, as minister pledges unwavering support for Ukraine

British spies to ramp up fight against Russian cyber threats with launch of cutting-edge AI research unit

Pat McFadden

UK spies to counter Russian cyber warfare threat with new AI security lab

Openreach van

Upgrade to Openreach ultrafast full fibre broadband ‘could deliver £66bn boost’

Laptop with a virus warning on the screen

Nato countries are in a ‘hidden cyber war’ with Russia, says Liz Kendall

Pat McFadden

Russia prepared to launch cyber attacks on UK, minister to warn

A Google icon on a smartphone

Firms can use AI to help offset Budget tax hikes, says Google UK boss

Icons of social media apps, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and WhatsApp, are displayed on a mobile phone screen

Growing social media app vows to shake up ‘toxic’ status quo

Will Guyatt questions who is responsible for the safety of children online

Are Zuckerberg and Musk responsible for looking after my kids online?