Microsoft Outlook down? Email problems hit users across the world – here’s what we know

Finally – we may have the end in sight, as confirmed by a new update on the Microsoft service health status page!

“We’ve identified a recent service change that is potentially contributing to user impact,” the company says.

Things have gone quiet again – we’re still seeing a good amount of outage reports on DownDetector, but nothing from Microsoft yet.

I imagine this is pretty annoying if you’re trying to get some work done!

We’ve finally had an update from Microsoft – seems this could be a longer-lasting gremlin than expected…

“We’re running tests to reproduce impact in our internal environment to obtain additional logging to isolate the source of the unexpected error messages,” the company has said.

It’s been 40 minutes since an update from Microsoft – although the outage reports do seem to be levelling off, that’s still quite a long time.

Interestingly, the outage does seem limited to just Microsoft Outlook, suggesting it is an issue directly relating to the email program.

Sadly this means Microsoft Teams is still running – so you can’t escape your morning stand-up meetings that easy.

Microsoft has updated its slightly vague and helpless message from earlier, with a slightly more confident-sounding post.

“We’re seeing specific errors related to authentication key failures,” it said. “We’re working to determine the underlying cause in order to determine our next mitigation steps.”

While that continues, outage reports continue to rise on DownDetector – although things are levelling off slightly.

This outage comes as many on the West Coast of the US are logging in to work first thing on Monday morning – so if that’s you, be prepared for a potentially slightly delayed work day!

We have to say the latest update from Microsoft doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

The official Azure status page has confirmed there is an issue, and it is being investigated.

Users “may experience intermittent issues signing in to Outlook.com”, the company says, as well as possibly seeing an “experience intermittent sign‑in failures, including “too many requests” errors or unexpected sign‑outs. Additionally, impacted users may include, but are not limited to, iOS users.”