If you typically access your Hotmail or Outlook account using the Gmail app, there’s a reason you probably haven’t seen any new emails today: Google says it’s investigating an issue it’s having syncing with Microsoft’s servers. According to Google’s status page, the company has been working to figure out what’s wrong since around noon ET, and has been in touch with Microsoft about the problem.
At first glance it seems like this partial outage would be a pretty niche issue — Outlook has its own app, who’s using the Gmail one? But for many Android phones the Gmail app is the default mail client, and it encourages you to add email address from any service, not just Google’s. If you’ve gone that route, it is worth noting that Outlook itself is still working so you can still check your messages by going to the site on your phone or computer’s browser.
Currently, trying to load your Outlook or Hotmail inbox in the Gmail app will either just show your old emails,or an error message saying that there was a problem syncing the folder and asking you to try again later. The issue is affecting “all device platforms,” according to Google.
Google says the issue are with Microsoft’s IMAP servers and that Microsoft has acknowledged that its service is also not syncing with “other large mail providers” as well. However, the Outlook Twitter account has seemingly contradicted this by responding to customer complaints saying “we’re not tracking any issues on our end.”
Google’s status page doesn’t mention any issues with Exchange, Microsoft’s email service for businesses, and I was able to sync Exchange emails using the Gmail app.