Microsoft Outlook hit by outage as millions WFH during rail strikes

Now OUTLOOK goes down! Microsoft’s email platform is hit by service issues as millions work from home during rail strikes

Microsoft has confirmed the problem and said it is working to fix it
Outlook users ‘may be unable to access mailboxes via any connection method’
The outage comes as millions work from home during rail strikes

Microsoft’s Outlook email platform has been hit by service issues making it inaccessible to some users.

The company has confirmed the problem and said it is working to fix it, with no other services currently appearing to be impacted.

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’.

The outage comes as millions of Brits have been forced to work from home amid the national rail strikes.

Microsoft’s Outlook email platform has been hit by service issues making it inaccessible to some users

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

What is a content delivery network?

A content delivery network (CDN) is a platform of servers that helps minimize delays in loading web page content.

Jake Moore, a cybersecurity specialist at ESET, explains: ‘Web pages are located all over the world so content delivery networks are placed to distribute the data evenly by reducing the physical distance between where it’s actually held and the end user. This helps users around the world view the same high quality information and content without any lag or slow loading times.’

More than half of the internet’s traffic is served by a CDN, according to internet services company Akamai.

In a statement on the site, Microsoft said: ‘We’re continuing to analyse service monitoring telemetry to identify the next troubleshooting steps to mitigate the impact.’

The company added that the issue was specific to some users in Europe.

The monitoring service showed it began receiving reports of problems at around 9am on Tuesday.

Many frustrated Outlook users have also taken to Twitter to discuss the outage.

One user wrote: ‘Nearly throwing my laptop out the window before realising that Outlook emails are down.’

Another tweeted: ‘Service has been down for more than three hours and almost all our mailboxes. This is incredibly bad.’

And one vented: ‘Come on Microsoft. This should not be allowed to happen. Our whole company is crippled without the use of email and it’s been down for hours. Where the back up plan!?!? #Ridiculous.’

The outage appears to be unrelated to an issue at web infrastructure firm Cloudflare.

A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a distributed group of severs around the world that work in unison. Websites use these CDNs to deliver content from the cloud safely and as quickly as possible.

Cloudflare is the most popular content delivery network by some margin.

A major outage at Cloudflare caused hundreds of websites across the internet to stop working and return a ‘500 Internal Server error’ message this morning

Websites affected by the outage from around 07:34 BST this morning included Discord, Shopify, Fitbit, Peloton, Grindr, Ring, bet365, Google, NordVPN, JustEat and Ladbrokes, according to Downdetector, which monitors website outages.

Cloudflare acknowledged the issue in an update on its official Twitter account.

‘The Cloudflare team is aware of the current service issues and is working to resolve as quickly as possible,’ it stated.

The company implemented a fix at 08.20 BST and posted an update on its service status page at 09:06 BST claiming to have resolved the issue.

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