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Microsoft recovering from seven-hour long Outlook.com outage

Microsoft recovering from seven-hour long Outlook.com outage

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Outlook.com outage
Outlook.com outage

Microsoft's Outlook.com webmail service has been suffering from sporadic outages for over seven hours today. The issues started around 10AM ET, affecting Outlook.com, the People address book of the mail service, and Microsoft's soon-to-be-renamed SkyDrive cloud storage service. The SkyDrive issues were resolved after around four hours, and the software maker now says — after seven hours of issues — that it has identified a solution to the Outlook.com problem. It has "brought most services back online," according to a recent status message. "The rest of services are being brought up gradually." Microsoft warns that mobile access to Outlook.com is still experiencing issues.

The outages seem to have been widespread and sporadic for Outlook.com users. Some had no issues early on, but then ran into problems at the latter stage of the outage. The problems come just as Microsoft touts 400 million active users of the service, and less than six months after Outlook.com suffered 16-hour long issues following a firmware upgrade at the company's datacenter. It's not clear if overheating datacenters were involved in today's outage, but we've reached out to Microsoft to confirm the root cause, and we'll update you accordingly.

Update: Microsoft doesn't have details on the cause yet, but a spokesperson has confirmed to The Verge that the company has "restored web access for all users," but that mobile devices are still experiencing problems. "We are working to restore full mobile access as quickly as possible," says a spokesperson.