Hotmail down: Microsoft issues statement after huge global Outlook outage

Microsoft has finally issued an update asmillions of users across the world face a service blackout.

People have taken to social media from all corners of the globe to report issues with both the web and app versions ofMicrosoft Outlook - which is used by more than 400 million people worldwide. Users are seeing warnings telling them their licenses aren't valid despite having paid their subscription feeds. Others are being locked out for incorrect email addresses and passwords though they are correct.

Many had been upset overOutlook'sfailure to provide an update quickly, with people taking to social media to say they were left in the dark while unable to work due to the glitch.

READ MORE: Microsoft Outlook down LIVE: Hotmail email down for millions of people

Several hours after the first issues were reported, Outlook has shared a statement in which they say their "fix is progressing quicker than anticipated". The full statement reads: "Our deployment of the fix is progressing quicker than anticipated and we expect impact to gradually mitigate as it progresses.

"We believe the issue will be resolved by our next update time."

Shortly after the initial statement, Outlook said they had "identified an issue" with their own fix, which thye will need to perform "additional validations" on.

They said: "We’ve identified an issue with the fix. We’re applying configuration changes, restarting affected components and additional validations are underway to confirm that authentication components are properly configured."

Users in some countries, like Italy, say they're facing a total blackout as they're locked out of both PC and mobile services. As it stands, issues have been reported in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, India, Italy, Peru, Spain, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.

According to outage map, DownDetector, the issues in the UK have been detected in several cities, including London, Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle and Glasgow.

Customers are reporting a number of different error messages relating to different access issues. Some have been seeing pop ups that say "connection to server failed", while others are being hit with 500 and 401 errors.

A 500 error indicates the server is encountering an unexpected condition that prevents it from fulfilling the user's request. A 401 is shown when the request has been unsuccessful due to missing or invalid authentication credentials

One user wrote on X: "I can’t access my Outlook.com email. I keep getting 500 and 401 errors on every device and browser. Microsoft support tools are asking me to log in, but I can’t access my account."