Microsoft Outlook has been down worldwide for more than a day, leaving people unable to log in or access their emails.
Thousands of users first started experiencing issues around 5am yesterday, including those in the UK, US and Australia, among others.
Error pages said users’ licences were not valid, despite being up-to-date with their subscription payments.
X user Kay said: ‘My Outlook is down, which means I can’t access my email. I have to code the site from scratch again. Nah, I’m livid.’
Ohio local Kelly posted: ‘I haven’t had access to my emails through Outlook since Tuesday evening. Help!
‘This is ridiculous and it’s costing me money being down.’
Hannah wrote on a Microsoft support forum: ‘I’m having the same issue, tried different browsers, incognito/private modes, different devices and nothing works. How can this be fixed, as this is a really important email account for me.’
The disruption impacted Outlook.com, Outlook Mobile and the Outlook desktop client.
Is Microsoft Outlook still down?
Microsoft engineers first attempted to patch the issue at about 8am yesterday, only to ‘identify an issue with the initial fix’ a few hours later.
The tech giant said on X yesterday evening that the technical glitch has been ‘resolved’.
The Microsoft serve health portal says that ‘everything is up and running’ on Outlook.com.
Yet systems still aren’t fully back online, with dozens still struggling to log in this morning, according to the outage tracker Downdetector.
‘STILL NOT WORKING! I can’t even log in my Windows user because of this, help us!’ an X user said.
Why did Microsoft Outlook go down?
Other than describing an ‘issue’, Microsoft has not revealed what caused Outlook to be knocked out.
Experts told Metro that the outage is unlikely to be a cyber attack, as some retailers like M&S and Co-op have faced in recent months.
Richard LaTulip, field chief information security officer at Recorded Future, said: ‘At this time, there is no indication that the Microsoft Outlook outage is the result of nefarious activity. Current reports indicate an internal technical issue affecting the mailbox infrastructure.
However, as with any widespread disruption, investigations are ongoing, and until root cause analysis is complete, malicious activity cannot be entirely ruled out.’
Daniel Dilks, an operations director at Sentinel Intelligence, told Metro that the cause of the outage could be a faulty update or sneaky bug in the software.
‘The Microsoft outage can be isolated due to various factors such as specific issues with Outlook’s code, server-side problems with Exchange online or conflict with add-ins or other software,’ he added.
Users were warned at the start of this week that Microsoft Authenticator will delete millions of passwords.
The app is most commonly used for two-factor authentication, using Face ID to log into email or company systems.
But the app, which has been downloaded over 100 million times on the Google Play store alone, was also used to store passwords with autofill until this month.
Microsoft now says ‘the password era is ending’, urging people to turn to alternative ways of logging in, and saying the app will no longer support passwords.
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