Outlook is down again for the second time today, with users facing a frustrating 503 error message when trying to access their accounts.

An outage earlier today affected many Outlook users around the world, affecting their ability to send emails and manage calendars. While Microsoft assured users that the problem was being fixed, the service was once again down, causing further inconvenience.

When visiting the website, users are now greeted with an error message “HTTP Error 503: The service is unavailable”, indicating that the service is temporarily unavailable or there is a server overload.

The Outlook mobile app also fails to connect to the service.

Our tests also observed 503 errors and performance issues when accessing emails or downloading attachments.

It’s fair to assume Microsoft’s tech team is actively working on a fix, and we’ll update this story when more details become available.

Update 1: Microsoft has fixed the 503 error and Outlook.com is loading again, but users are still unable to send or open emails as shown in the screenshot above.