Microsoft Outlook Down: Outage Leaves Users Worldwide Unable to Access Emails Again
Microsoft Outlook is down, leaving users unable to read or send emails through the service. This is the second major Outlook outage of the week, with the service having also malfunctioned on Monday.
According to the website Down Detector, Outlook users started experiencing issues at around 2 a.m. ET, and at the time of publication they are yet to be fully resolved.
Users based around the world have been flagging issues with the service to Microsoft via Twitter, and the company has acknowledged that there is a problem.
"Thank you for flagging this with us, the engineering team is aware and are collecting additional data from the affected infrastructures to determine impact to our Exchange online protocols," the official Microsoft Outlook Twitter account told users.
In a subsequent update, The Microsoft 365 Status Twitter account said: We've determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of impact. We've reverted the update and are monitoring the service for recovery.
"Rollback has mitigated impact for the affected features in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams...For impact to the Exchange service...majority of the users are seeing recovery and we're taking measures to ensure full recovery for all our users worldwide."
This outage does not appear to be as significant as the one that occurred on Monday, which took out Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Office for several hours.
The company initially thought that a "recent change" it had implemented was to blame for Monday's outage, but the situation did not improve as expected after Microsoft rolled the change back.
"Rerouting traffic to alternate infrastructure" did, however, help get most Outlook, Teams and Office users back online.
With so many people working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses are more reliant on online services than ever, and outages can cause even more disruption than usual.
Amongst the many millions of people relying on Microsoft's online services right now are Microsoft's own employees, who are also working from home. The tech giant does not plan to fully reopen its U.S. offices until at least January.
This has also been a rough week for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who is no longer at the company. Gates has found himself embroiled in a war of words with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who this week called him a "knucklehead."
In July, Gates cast doubt on Musk's knowledge about coronavirus vaccine development in an interview with CNBC, asserting that Musk's "positioning is to maintain a high level of outrageous comments."
Musk also lashed out last month, saying that Gates had "no clue" about electric vehicles after the Microsoft co-founder failed to mention Tesla's work in a blog post about electric vehicles.
This article has been updated to include additional information from Microsoft.
