Microsoft's outlook.com is unreliable

[StandingInAlley]

I was having issues signing into my outlook.com account so decided to check the status and it seems its running fine except I can't access my inbox or people or calendar hub from the web. (Working fine on the phone) 

 

Here is a history from Microsoft showing outlook's outage for the past 60 days (Kudos to them for being transparent) :

 

https://status.live.com/history

 

I was planning to migrate everything from Google and iCloud to Outlook since I have switched to WP8 device and will be using MS Surface but now I don't think i want to do it.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[123456789A]

They list those things even when it affects less than 1% of their customers, so it's not like you'll experience all of those outages (a lot of them aren't even outages). I wouldn't worry about it so much.

[einsteinbqat]

I have no problem here. Accessing it without trouble.

 

I suppose that it is either localised problem or that it is something specific to you. I would wait a bit, and try again in a few moments.

 

As Enron said, MS may list the problem, but it does not mean that it will affect you. 

[vcfan]

if you believe all other services run flawlessly every single minute, you are only fooling yourself.

[Nashy]

No issue.

Only thing that annoys me is when you are managing your own domain with them.  I add an email account, and it sends the account an email to verify it, but won't let me login to the account!

[Darrian]

The only trouble I've ever had with Outlook.com was a few nights ago it had trouble connecting to messenger/skype, and so did my Lumia, so obviously it was trouble with the messenger servers and not the mail servers.  Other than that it's been pretty reliable, and I switched the day it became available.

[Ambroos]

if you believe all other services run flawlessly every single minute, you are only fooling yourself.

Google has very little downtime, and the longest amount of downtime they had recently was about five minutes. I remember there was an Outlook outage recently that lasted hours? Pretty big difference. Five minutes is a coffee break, hours is a lot of work lost.

[+Warwagon MVC]

This is why I would never want to be Network Admin, I don't need that kind of stress.

[primexx]

The thing that prevents me from switching to Outlook, aside from the fact that it'd be quite pointless since they're just as much in bed with the NSA as Google is, is that their custom domains service seems to be completely neglected http://www.domains.live.com/

[theyarecomingforyou]

I've found Outlook.com to be quite unreliable, with numerous downtime issues, security errors and sending issues over the past year. I never noticed any down time with my previous AOL account, which I found to be incredibly reliable over the ten years I used it as my primary account. To be honest I was quite surprised, as Microsoft is the last company you'd expect to have major reliability issues with.

[articuno1au]

From top to bottom.

 

Their outages are generally area driven, like EAS support went down but the service stayed up. Most times when I see reports on Neowin of it being down I haven't encountered it myself.

 

The only issue I had had was of the EAS shutdown due to a software glitch.

 

Regarding domains, it works fine, isn't neglected but does run on their old interface still. All their stuff connects to Outlook correctly and works as intended. Their domains support staff are active (albeit a little slow) and get stuff done.

 

Every service has down time. All of the downtime MS has seen of late has been external stuff (i.e. not Outlook.com but perhaps their owned infrastructure) that's caused them grief.

 

It's a good service :\

[vcfan]

Google has very little downtime, and the longest amount of downtime they had recently was about five minutes. I remember there was an Outlook outage recently that lasted hours? Pretty big difference. Five minutes is a coffee break, hours is a lot of work lost.

 

google has had outages for hours in the past. no one is immune to hardware/software failures,not google,not microsoft,not anyone. NASDAQ had a three hour outage just last month.

[StandingInAlley]

They list those things even when it affects less than 1% of their customers, so it's not like you'll experience all of those outages (a lot of them aren't even outages). I wouldn't worry about it so much.

 

I doubt. This was said by MS:  Reports are available for problems that impacted a large number of customers 

 

P.s - It's working fine for me now. 

 

Edit - One very cool thing is that when I change the accent color of my tiles on Windows Phone, it changes it on Outlook.com. Right now I'm using green so outlook.com is green as well. 

[AJerman]

Google has very little downtime, and the longest amount of downtime they had recently was about five minutes. I remember there was an Outlook outage recently that lasted hours? Pretty big difference. Five minutes is a coffee break, hours is a lot of work lost.

I know I've only seen Google, specifically Gmail go down maybe once or twice in the what, 7 or 8 years now that I've been using it? I'm sure it has gone down more than that, but I'm just referring to what I've witnessed. I've seen Outlook.com go down FAR more than that, and I don't even use Outlook.com to keep an eye on it.

[techbeck]

meh, outages happen.   I have not really experienced an outage that effected a me, or anyone I know, except Neflix and Facebook.

[LittleNeutrino Veteran]

i do not use outlook.com enough to notice any issues with it.

[theyarecomingforyou]

meh, outages happen.

That's a given but the criticism is over how frequently they occur. I have had more outages with Outlook.com in one year than I did with AOL in ten years.

[techbeck]

That's a given but the criticism is over how frequently they occur. I have had more outages with Outlook.com in one year than I did with AOL in ten years.

 

I don't really use Outlook.com so wouldnt know.  I have an account tho if I ever decide to use it.

[MikeChipshop Member]

Google has very little downtime, and the longest amount of downtime they had recently was about five minutes. I remember there was an Outlook outage recently that lasted hours? Pretty big difference. Five minutes is a coffee break, hours is a lot of work lost.

 

Really? Recently they've had quite a bit of downtime lasting hours.

[Jeffrey89]

Yesterday for about 20 minutes, all my Skype contacts were offline, then returned.
Today, I'm having the same issue all night. I checked Outlook.com and Outlook 2013... My contact list was empty?!
I couldn't find posts yet mentioning this, so is this only affecting a small amount of users? I have the issue on 2 accounts...

[Sir Topham Hatt]

google has had outages for hours in the past. no one is immune to hardware/software failures,not google,not microsoft,not anyone. NASDAQ had a three hour outage just last month.

 

Facebook is immune.

Have you not seen The Social Network?

[Torolol]

Google services generally have less outages than Microsoft's.

[remixedcat]

Outlook.com and even thier custom domain services have had a lot of issues this year :( Too bad Google Apps Email isn't free anymore :(

[vcfan]

Google has very little downtime, and the longest amount of downtime they had recently was about five minutes. I remember there was an Outlook outage recently that lasted hours? Pretty big difference. Five minutes is a coffee break, hours is a lot of work lost.

 

*cough* *cough*

 

https://www.neowin.net/news/google-offers-explanation-and-apology-for-mondays-gmail-issues

 

 

Many users of Gmail were a bit frustrated on Monday as they were not getting their emails as fast as they normally would. In some case, emails with attachments were arriving in Gmail inboxes without them. The issues lasted for about 11 hours.

Today, Google posted an apology on their Gmail blog, stating, " ... we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn?t deliver." It also offered an explanation for the problems, saying: