Microsoft Outlook, SkyDrive outages hit users worldwide

Microsoft is still trying to resolve a nagging problem that has affected access to Outlook.com for many users.

A few of Microsoft's key online services started suffering from hiccups on Wednesday. Many users reported trouble trying to access Outlook.com, SkyDrive, and Contacts. Microsoft's status dashboard confirmed the trouble with all three. The problems with SkyDrive and Contacts were apparently resolved on Wednesday, and they were given a clean bill of health later in the day via the status page.

Outlook.com has remained the sole problem child, and it's proving to be a difficult one. In the latest update to its status page at 6:39 a.m. PT Thursday, Microsoft said: "Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped. We'll provide an update by August 15, 1:00 PM [ET]. We apologize for the lengthy interruption in service."

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We're going into Day 2-plus of an Outlook.com outage which has resulted in some users not being able to get access their e-mail for the better part of this past week.

Just before noon on August 16, Microsoft switched the Live.com dashboard status claiming the Outlook.com issue was resolved to it's still not fully fixed.

"Fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped. We'll provide an update by August 17 12:00 AM (EST)," according to the latest dashboard message. "We apologize for the lengthy interruption in service."

A spokesperson sent me the following statement when I asked for more information as to what's caused the issue this week:

"The (Outlook.com) issue has been resolved for the vast majority of our customers, but we are still working to restore full service in a few limited scenarios. We will provide more details and a post mortem soon, so that customers can learn what happened and how we resolved it."

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