Is Outlook Down?

A recent study found that nearly 10 billion emails are sent daily in the United States. That’s a lot of bad jokes from your Uncle, newsletters you don’t read, and high-pressure sales attempts from companies you’ve never heard of. While it wouldn’t be a great loss to miss out on those particular emails, there’s always a great anxiety if your email account just stops working.

With that in mind, let’s cut to the real question you want answered: Is Outlook down? The answer is that an outage of the email giant is pretty unlikely. While regional outages are more common than global ones, these issues are usually cleared up in very little time. So, is it Outlook, your account, your devices, or even your internet? Let’s find out with this troubleshooting guide.

How to troubleshoot Outlook

Email has been around since the mid 1990s, and in that time, every single user has come up with their own way to check if their email service is working. Panic may have been the reason for these homebrew solutions, and some of them actually worked. Regardless, we tend to side with the troubleshooting advice from the email providers themselves. Below, you will find out how to check if Outlook is down and then how to find out if something else is amiss if it’s not.

Check for an Outlook outage

Finding out if Outlook is down means dealing with Microsoft, and while it may not be as fun as Apple, it is nothing if not meticulous with its offerings. Simply go to the Microsoft Service Health Status page and see if Outlook is operating or not. No other steps required!

On this page, you can view all of Microsoft’s services. If everything is in working order, you’ll see a green banner at the top of the page that reads “All products are operational.” To see Outlook’s status, scroll to the “Microsoft consumer products” section and click “Show products.”

No outage? Try these steps next

If it’s not Outlook, you need to start investigating your own side of this issue. Try the following steps to identify the problem:

1. Log in and out of your account. Try using the browser-based log in so you can rule out the app or the account itself being the issue.
2. Download any updates to your app and devices. Being up to date with the latest updates is sometimes critical to getting back on track.
3. Check your cables! Find your router, make sure everything is plugged in, and that it’s humming along like it normally does.

Check your internet connection

If your internet is the problem, we’d seriously suggest looking at your internet provider options. Do you know what internet service providers are available in your area? Any idea how much you should even be paying for internet every month? Fret not! We’ve got all the answers below with our free tool. Drop your zip code in the box below, and you’ll see what providers are available. In a matter of a few clicks, you’ll see all the best plans and deals. Go for it!