A giant bug is affecting Microsoft services, preventing users from accessing their Outlook.com accounts from traditional email applications. The company is offering a temporary workaround.
A slight wave of panic, and above all frustration, is blowing among Outlook.com email account holders. Over the past ten days, many users have reported, on Reddit or on Microsoft support pagest, be unable to log into their account when using an email application.
The problem seems to affect all email clients indiscriminately, whether the different versions of Outlook (2013, 2016 and Microsoft 365) or Thunderbird for example. When trying to access their Outlook.com account from an application, affected users are prompted to authenticate using their credentials, but the process is unsuccessful and they are thrown back into a loop at the same login screen, even if the address and password entered are correct.
Using an app password or the password reset feature otherwise doesn’t seem to help. Microsoft officially acknowledges the existence of the problem on a dedicated page :
Outlook and other applications fail to connect to Outlook.com.
Some users reported that logging in with an app password allowed them to log in, but then reverted to a logged out state.
Since approximately 01/23/24, users have reported connection issues with Outlook 2013, Outlook 2016, Outlook for Microsoft 365, Thunderbird, and mobile email apps when connecting with POP, IMAP, and Exchange connections.
Although it does not affect all users of Outlook.com accounts, the malfunction still appears to be large-scale and affects email clients on Windows and MacOS computers as well as Android and iOS smartphones. Microsoft indicates that the Outlook development and maintenance teams are currently working on identifying the problem, but are not yet providing any details on its potential origin or resolution time.
If you are affected by this particularly penalizing bug, there is no point in persisting in entering your identifiers on the login screen of your messaging application, nor in repeatedly resetting your password. It is much simpler to use the workaround proposed by Microsoft, which consists of accessing the email via an ordinary web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox, etc.), at the address Outlook.com. You will certainly not have the functions of your usual software, but you will at least be able to read and write messages with this online service, while the problem is resolved. Which hopefully shouldn’t take too long.