For several days, a giant bug affected Microsoft services, preventing users from accessing their Outlook.com account from traditional messaging applications. But the publisher has finally resolved the problem.
A small wave of panic, and above all frustration, has blown among Outlook.com email account holders. Over the course of ten days, many users reported, on Reddit or on Microsoft support pagest, being unable to log into their account when using an email application.
The problem seemed to affect all email clients indifferently, whether 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 were prompted to authenticate using their credentials, but the process was unsuccessful and they were thrown back into a loop at the same login screen, even if the address and password entered were correct.
Using an app password or the password reset feature otherwise didn’t seem to help, and Microsoft officially acknowledged 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 did not affect all users of Outlook.com accounts, the malfunction still appeared to be large-scale and affected email clients on Windows and MacOS computers as well as Android and iOS smartphones. Microsoft then indicated that the Outlook development and maintenance teams were actively working to identify the problem, but did not provide any details on its potential origin or resolution time.
For users affected by this particularly penalizing bug, there was no point in struggling to enter their identifiers on the login screen of the messaging application, nor in repeatedly resetting their password. The only workaround offered by Microsoft was to access your email via your web browser (Edge, Chrome, Firefox, etc.), at the address Outlook.com. This solution certainly did not allow access to all the functions of the desktop version of Outlook, but at least allowed you to read and write messages until the problem was resolved.
Outlook.com accounts: Access is restored for email apps
A little more than a week after the first reports from users regarding the problem connecting to Outlook.com accounts from email clients, Microsoft indicated that it had resolved this malfunction on the page dedicated to tracking the bug. The Outlook Services team deployed a fix between January 31 and January 1er February 2024, which should restore access to Outlook.com accounts from an email application.
However, the company specifies that users of Outlook 2013 and 2016 may continue to see the login credentials entry window appear in a loop, because these older versions of Microsoft’s email client poorly handle two-factor authentication. . For users who have activated this protection mechanism and are still experiencing the connection problem, it is necessary to set an application passwordto be used when entering their identifiers, instead of the password for their Outlook.com account.
While the scope and severity of the incident remained limited, with users still able to read and send messages from the Outlook for the web application accessible from an Internet browser, the problem will nevertheless have generated a lot of frustration and trouble. annoyance among Microsoft customers. In addition to being a painful malfunction, its resolution was somewhat late and it adds to a long series of bugs of all kinds which punctuate recent Windows updates. Let’s hope that the next few months are not of the same ilk and that future new products from Microsoft experience fewer hiccups when they are released, a new major version of Windows 11 being planned for this year.