Microsoft’s Outlook email service hit by outage

Microsoft’s Outlook email platform is continuing to face problems for some users, after being hit by service issues earlier on Tuesday, which knocked the service offline for some.

The company has confirmed the problem and said it is working to fix it, with no other services currently appearing to be affected, but said some Outlook users continued to be impacted several hours later.

According to Microsoft’s own service status website, some Outlook users “may be unable to access their mailboxes via any connection method” and may encounter “delays sending, receiving or accessing email messages”.

In its most recent update on the site, Microsoft said it now planned to restart the infrastructure causing the problem in an attempt to fully rectify the issue.

“We’re continuing to see improvement in service availability, but some users are still experiencing impact,” Microsoft said.

“We’re restarting the infrastructure that serves user requests, to resolve the remaining impact and fully restore service.”

The company also confirmed that the issue was no longer specific to some users in Europe, but was affecting people around the world.

Earlier, the company said it had identified the source of the issue, which was its “traffic management infrastructure”, which Microsoft said was “not working as expected”.

The firm said it had “successfully routed traffic to an alternate traffic management method”, which had improved service, but some users continue to be affected.

According to the website monitoring service Down Detector, affected users said they were seeing messages telling them they have been unable to connect to a server, and are struggling to connect to the service from a range of devices.

The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems at about 9am on Tuesday, but reported issues in the UK had dropped substantially by late Tuesday.

The outage appears to be unrelated to an issue at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare, which took a large number of popular websites offline earlier on Tuesday.

Cloudflare said the problem has now been resolved.