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Outlook.com is down, Microsoft is investigating the cause (Update: Fixed)

Image Credit: Microsoft

Outlook.com is down today. We first noticed the problem at 10:19 a.m. Pacific: we couldn’t log into the website, and soon our mobile devices started giving errors like “Couldn’t sign in.”

Complaints about the outage for the email provider are widespread, according to searches on Facebook and Twitter. Sites like Down Detector confirm the problem, but similar services that just ping the website you’re checking will naturally report that Outlook.com is doing just fine. The domain still works, but the service simply doesn’t.

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Microsoft’s own Office 365 Service health page claimed that “Everything is up and running” for a while but was finally updated with the following information:

Title: Can’t connect to Outlook.com

User Impact: Users may be unable to connect to the Outlook.com service.

More info: Affected users may receive an error stating: “Something went wrong.” If site access is successful, the web client may not render successfully.

Current status: We’re analyzing the affected infrastructure to determine the cause of impact.

We contacted Microsoft for more information about the outage and will update you if we hear back.

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Update at 11:45 a.m. Pacific: Microsoft has found the cause of the problem. “Our investigation determined that a portion of the capacity responsible for routing connection requests to the mailbox databases became degraded. We’re shifting traffic to a healthy portion of the infrastructure to remediate impact.”

Update at 12:30 p.m. Pacific: “We’re continuing to shift traffic to a healthy portion of the infrastructure to remediate impact.”

Update at 1:00 pm.m Pacific: Outlook.com is working again, both the website and via any email clients you have it hooked up to. “We’ve resolved the interruption some customers in North America may have experienced with our free email service,” a Microsoft spokesperson told VentureBeat.

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