Microsoft confirmed that an April 27 “service degradation” incident, commonly known as an outage to us mere mortals, left some users around the world unable to access their Outlook.com email. Having said that, “a recent service change” was potentially to blame, and putting a rollback into place, Microsoft finally posted that the issue was remediated. But it would appear that iPhone users need to take action if they are to regain access to their Outlook or Hotmail emails using the built-in Apple Mail app.
Take These Steps To Regain Access To Outlook Emails On Your iPhone
While Gmail is the world’s most popular email service, with more than 3 billion users according to Google itself, Outlook and Hotmail remain in the mix. But here’s the thing, when it comes to iPhone users, many of them prefer to use the default Apple Mail app for their email, no matter the provider. When Outlook goes down it is an inconvenience, and thoughts of a cybersecurity-related cause are never far from the mind. However, truth be told, this is rarely the case. Indeed, a failed update is most commonly to blame. Microsoft has, it must be said, something of a history with dodgy updates. I’ve reported on a Windows security update that broke VPN connections, and a Windows 10 extended security update that failed to install, for example.
Now it’s the turn of iPhone users to feel the Microsoft update pain, it would seem. This time impacting just iOS users when accessing Outlook and Hotmail from the default Mail app. Microsoft confirmed the April 27 outage, stating: “iOS users may experience issues accessing Outlook and Hotmail from the default Mail app,” in an official service status posting.
Thankfully, the incident has now been resolved, but it has left iOS users needing to take additional steps before they can come out the other side and regain full access to their emails.
“iOS users on iPhones must take the following steps to re-enter their password and access their accounts,” Microsoft warned, emphasizing that the impact of the incident would not be resolved otherwise.
- Open the Settings app on your iPhone.
- Scroll down and tap on Mail.
- Select Accounts under the Mail settings.
- Tap on the email account for which you need to re-enter the password.
- Tap on Account Settings or directly on the Password field (depending on your iOS version).
- Enter the updated or correct password in the Password field.
- Tap Done to save the changes.
- Open the Mail app to confirm that the account is syncing properly and emails are being sent/received.
Microsoft confirmed, “users that have completed the additional steps are now able to access Outlook and Hotmail.” So, if you are using an iPhone and having difficulty in getting your Outlook email using ther default Mail app, you know what to do.
