Microsoft Outlook users, including those with a Hotmail email address, who use the Gmail mobile app experienced a brief outage when Google and Outlook’s servers stopped talking to each other.
Affected users stopped receiving new emails on February 22, either experiencing an error page or seeing old emails that weren’t up-to-date with their real-time inbox.
In the meantime, Outlook continued to work on other apps and its browser portal, however users without the error message may not have realized that their inbox had stopped syncing.
Outlook outage in Gmail app
While Outlook has its own app, Gmail remains a popular mobile client for Android users because it comes pre-installed and can support multiple accounts, including non-Google email providers. It’s also a firm favorite for many Gmail account holders on other mobile platforms, like iOS, for its versatility and intuitive design.
Google’s status page (opens in new tab) first announced that its team was investigating reports of “Gmail sync issue with Microsoft servers when using IMAP.”
A description of the issue reads: “Customers accessing Outlook or Hotmail email accounts on Gmail application across all device platforms are unable to sync new messages.”
Several updates later, the company announced that it had teamed up with Microsoft’s engineers to resolve the issue, which apparently delivered results, because fewer than 12 hours later the issue was reported fixed.
It’s unclear what caused the issue, but the patch was implemented in the background because as of today there have been no updates to the Gmail app on Android devices for two weeks. An update to the app on iOS was released yesterday, however it’s likely not connected to the outage that was largely a server mishap.
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