Microsoft yesterday confirmed that its free email service Outlook.com suffered an outage. The outage affected thousands across the Europe but it appears that Microsoft’s Outlook is now back up and running.
“We’ve redirected requests to alternate infrastructure to restore service, and we’re monitoring the environment while connectivity recovers. Additionally, we’re investigating an issue in which users are unable to send email messages,” Microsoft said.
Microsoft has confirmed that on Monday the outage began at 7:20AM GMT and lasted for more than 12 hours. Microsoft has briefly stated the cause and result of the outage and as well as the duration. During the outage, the Outlook users weren’t able to send or even receive the emails.
Microsoft has also revealed the reason that caused the Outlook services to go offline. The Redmond giant’s internet traffic load-balancing system faced the problem. Although there was no increase in the traffic, the server capacity was being used due to a bug. “Everything is up and running,” Microsoft said in a blog post on its Office site.
One of the world’s first webmail services, Outlook is still very popular. It was founded in 1996 as Hotmail and in 1997 Microsoft acquired the free email service for $400 million, it was later replaced by Outlook brand in 2013.
