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

Welcome to our coverage of this outage - not long ago, we saw huge spikes in reports on outage tracker DownDetector, with Microsoft Outlook affected.

As you can see - that's quite the spike in outage reports on DownDetector for Microsoft Outlook...

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."

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

"We've completed reverting the recently introduced change, however, this has not produced any relief," the company noted on its service health status page.

"We're continuing to investigate the unexpected increase in error rates affecting two separate error scenarios to identify any potential root cause which may be responsible for this. Additionally, we're closely monitoring service telemetry to discover any other potential actions, or 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!

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."

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.

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.

This might be a good time to highlight our guide to the best email provider around right now.

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.

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!

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.

"We're testing a roll back of this change to determine if this remediates impact. In parallel, we're continuing to investigate the unusual error patterns that were previously observed."

So fingers crossed - this could sort it!

Reports also seem to be declining on DownDetector, so it could be bad news for everyone looking to avoid emails for a little longer.

Well that's a turn-up for the books - Microsoft has admitted its earlier fix didn't work as expected.

"The roll back that was completed does not appear to have provided the intended impact relief," the company says in its latest update. "We're continuing to look at internal reproductions of the impact to find potential next steps for mitigation and understand the source of error messages."

Progress! At last, Microsoft thinks it might have found the issue, after quite a few hours of struggle.

"After reviewing the logs collected from internal reproductions we've found a pattern of errors that point to a recent backend configuration change that may be causing impact," the company has said.

"We've completed a roll back of this configuration change. We're now carefully monitoring the environment to determine if it worked as intended or if there are additional steps required for full incident resolution."

So things may nearly be back to normal!

Microsoft thinks it has fixed the issue!

"The roll back of the previously mentioned configuration change is complete and our telemetry indicates service health is recovering," the company says. "We'll continue to monitor to confirm this fully resolves the issue."

iOS users were particularly badly hit, it adds, providing a list of steps for users on Apple devices to get access once again:

-Open the Settings app on your iPhone.

-Scroll down and tap on Mail.

-Select Accounts under the Mail settings.

-Tap on the email account for which you need to reenter the password.

-Tap on Account Settings or directly on the Password field (depending on your iOS version).

-Enter the updated or correct password in the Password field.

-Tap Done to save the changes.

-Open the Mail app to confirm that the account is syncing properly and emails are being sent/received.

Good luck!

And with that, we're seeing outage reports drop on DownDetector, so that should (hopefully) be the end of that.

We'll keep an eye open just in case any issues flare up again, but thanks for staying with us!