Outlook.com down for many users

A map showing areas from where Outlook.com outage has been reported so far.

According to downdetector.com, there has been a significant spike in reports of problems. About 64 per cent of those who reported problems are having an issue logging in, like me.

Graph shows a spike in reports on Downdetector.com

Thankfully, Outlook.com is not a primary email for me, though it was my first email account, originally on hotmail.com. I migrated as the mail had become redundant since I moved to Gmail well over a decade ago. However, the email account was recovered a couple of years back as a backup for my office mail, which was lagging behind not just on storage limits. Now, most of my important office mail is there, stuck behind a frowning smiley.

Outages are common in the internet industry. Though everyone strives for zero downtime, services do occasionally go off. It has happened to Twitter and it’s happened to many others services. But a 24-hour outage is rare, especially coming from a company like Microsoft. Most probably the issue is troubling only some users, but then this should not be acceptable, even for a free service. Strangely, there is no mention of any outage on the Outlook twitter handle.

Many would think twice about the dependability of this service even when it comes back, especially for emails that you need to retrieve regularly.

UPDATE: Microsoft says certain users are facing issues logging in to the service as they were migrating some accounts to the cloud. They refused to call it an outage, saying only sum clusters of users were affected.