An outage in Microsoft 's email service , Outlook, affected webmail, desktop and smartphone apps .
Microsoft's Outlook email service was down today for users around the world, affecting the email website, Outlook.com, as well as Microsoft's apps for desktops and smartphones.
The outage began today at approximately 2:00 a.m. ET, after Microsoft confirmed that it was affecting accounts for users worldwide, without exception.
Specifically, Outlook users were unable to access their email account, while Outlook.com failed to load for approximately four hours.
Microsoft says a recent configuration change it made is responsible for the issues. "We have determined that a recent configuration update to components that route user requests was the cause of this issue," the tech in a service message on Twitter.
"We have rolled back the update in question and are monitoring the service for full recovery."
This is the second major outage of Microsoft services in less than a week. As we reported on Monday, Microsoft Outlook, Office 365, Teams, and other services from the company experienced outages for several hours.
Unlike other companies like Cloudflare, Microsoft doesn't fully describe the root cause of its outages, so we may never know exactly why its Outlook email service experienced these significant issues twice this week.
Outlook services have now started to return to online operation for most users, and Microsoft says it has "rolled back the update and telemetry shows that the service is now recovering," according to The Verge.
