Except for your physical mailbox at the end of the driveway. You hoist the red flag to mail a letter, and you expect the mail carrier to deliver your bills and postcards. However, day after day, the carrier whizzes by. Your outgoing mail is there; nothing else comes through. You know the post office is open, you know people are writing to you, but there is a signal break with your home. That is precisely the fate befalling thousands of Microsoft Outlook mobile app users right now.
The IMAP Blackout
Outlook mobile app has been hit hard over the Last 24 Hours – both Android and iOS. The guilty party is the IMAP sync protocol. To oversimplify things a bit, IMAP, or Internet Message Access Protocol, is the protocol your phone uses to communicate with your email provider’s server. It is what makes it so that when you read an email on your phone, the message appears as “read” on your laptop. It preserves your two mirrors of email life in perfect reflection.
Currently, that reflection is shattered. Users are saying the app will not load new content. It whirs, it loads, and then, in the end, it foils you. It is not just that you missed out on a newsletter from your fave clothing brand; for many people, this is the leading portal for business communications, two-factor authentication codes, and important/urgent family info. The silence is deafening.
Symptoms of the Glitch
The problem rears its head in a couple of aggravating ways. For some users, the app seems to be working fine, but for some reason, the “Last Updated” timestamp has not been updated for hours or days. It gives a false sense of security. You feel like you are all up to date, but in truth, you are flying blind. For others, the app spits out impenetrable error messages about server timeouts or credential failures that send users into a state of panic over whether they have been hacked or their password has expired.
It is not a total server crash where the app would not open at all; it is what we call a “zombie” state. The app breathes, the interface smooshes, but the blood flow — the data that makes it healthy — has stopped pumping. Notification delays are also common; you may receive a buzz in your pocket several hours after an email arrives, making time-sensitive alerts useless.
The ‘Turn It Off and On Again’ Fix
Microsoft has not only recognized the system shake, but it has not pushed a permanent patch to app stores either. In the meantime, support forums are consolidating around a temporary (if annoying) solution: delete and re-add the account.
You can think of this as a jammed zipper. Occasionally, no amount of wiggling will work, and you have to zip all the way up or down and recouple that row of teeth to get everything back on track. When you remove the account from the Outlook app settings (do not fret: this does not delete your actual emails from the server), then sign back in, you effectively force the app to get everything back to where it was. It walks through the corrupted temporary files to let me pass, and then I have a new bridge for my data to travel over.
Why Does This Happen?
Email protocols are old by tech standards. IMAP was designed decades ago. Moreover, though it is a solid system, these days modern apps pile all sorts of advanced features on top of it — smart filtering, focused inboxes, calendar integrations. Occasionally, a server-side update (that is, where they live) conflicts with code on the client side (your phone). It is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole — usually, the software takes its metaphorical clippers and shaves off all the corners so everything fits, but sometimes the peg gets stuck.
Until the stable release arrives, you should use your phone’s native email apps or check email in a web browser to make sure no vital communications slip through the cracks.
