Are Hotmail And Outlook Down, Not Working?

Monday, Microsoft Outlook users around the world were having trouble gaining access to their email accounts. The website Down Detector showed the issues were widespread across Europe and the United Kingdom. Neither Microsoft nor Outlook have used Twitter to put out a message about the outages.

However on the Outlook Twitter account there was someone responding to a few users who were voicing the issues they were having with their mail.

While the account was sending responses, but wasn’t offering much of a solution to users. The general response was that Outlook was aware of the issue and “engineers are working on it.” Users in the UK had been experiencing the issues since the morning, local time. By the afternoon there, many still were without email.

There was an update to the service health page of Microsoft’s site. It showed that the current status of Outlook.com was down and said that “Users may be unable to send email messages.” Additionally it noted users would likely see emails they tried to send earlier were still in their “drafts” folder.

A message about the current status said, “We've identified that a subset of infrastructure was unable to process requests as expected, which caused general service availability to drop unexpectedly. We've redirected requests to alternate infrastructure to restore service, and we're monitoring the environment while connectivity recovers. Additionally, we're investigating an issue in which users are unable to send email messages.” The Outlook Twitter account was sending a link to this service message to users via a reply Monday morning EDT.

The outage was also impacting Hotmail email accounts. Users on Twitter were fairly upset and tweeting at Outlook asking for a reason or time they could expect the problem to be solved.

An article by the Evening Telegraph said the problem could last up to 24 hours. A user on downtoday.co.uk said they spoke to the company and were told the issues were due to an ongoing system update and that they were working to resolve the problems and expected everything to be resolved within 24 hours. However, these claims haven’t been confirmed by Microsoft.

Outlook was trying to have a sense of humor about the outage, although some users may not have been in the mood for jokes.

“Intermittent connectivity is affecting customers in some European countries, which we are working to resolve as soon as possible,” a Microsoft spokesperson told International Business Times. Further information about what was causing the outage or when it would likely be solved was unavailable.