Microsoft rolling out fix for Outlook syncing bug

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
last updated

If you've been having trouble syncing your Outlook account with an app or smartphone recently, a fix is thankfully on the way. On its Office 365 service status page (opens in new tab) (via ZDNet), Microsoft notes that it has started deploying a fix for the syncing issue, which has been impacting some users since Thursday, November 17.

From Microsoft:

We've completed the fix and are deploying it throughout the affected environment. While the fix is being deployed, some users may begin to access and synchronize their Outlook.com accounts while using applications or mobile devices.

As noted by ZDNet, the issue seems to have mainly impacted users in Europe, judging by a Down Detector heat map of user-reported issues. It's currently unclear what the actual cause of the issue was, but a fix should be good news to those experiencing the issue regardless. If you are still having trouble syncing your Outlook.com account, Microsoft recommends logging in to check your email via a web browser as an alternative.

Have you hit any snags with syncing your Outlook.com account recently? Let us know in the comments if things have cleared up!

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. 

62 Comments
  • Finally!. Lumia 950xl canada
  • Europe
  • I have the issue of getting 30+ notifications for each email I get. Hopefully that gets fixed
  • What is the calendar tile app?
  • Tiles for Outlook
  • Hope I get my contact pictures back (WP 8.1 & 10)
  • You won't.
  • I had no issues here except for syncing my @live account on Outlook 2016 yesterday. But Mail on PC keeps bringing back messages that I've already deleted - I have to use either Outlook.com or Outlook 2016 to do so.
  • I have not experienced syncing issues at all but opening/displaying emails is really slow. If I click on an email on my Lumia 650 it takes 5-10 seconds to display the text and any images included in the email. Is this related to the syncing issue at all?
  • This is on my 950XL as well, I actually put a feedback issue in. http://aka.ms/Dr7tq4
  • the only issue I have encountered is the following... the notification center will tell me I have new e-mails A, B and C. I click on B inside the action center because I need to read that one, but once Outlook opens it open C, which is spam, but when I click to delete that message (from the message itself) it goes back out but it actually deleted e-mail B.  So then I have to go into the deleted items to retreive it. Basically it opens the wrong e-mail when I click from the notification panel..
  • Same issue here... I've multiple accounts set up on my Windows phone, and when I've received a mail on my personal outlook account, this will always be the mail that opens when opening any mail via the notifications centre. After restarting the phone (950) it works fine, until I receive an other mail on this personal account. Very annoying!
  • I've had this issue plenty of times also
  • Yepp, have the same problem, if I touch an email notification in the action center on Win10M, it opens the last email I read, not the new one....pretty annoying.
  • Looking forward to this! This issue has been driving me nuts.
  • Agreed.
    Next step, fix the contacts picture not showing up in the contact app.
  • half of mine came back a few days ago, not sure exactly how i managed it but it involved resyncing them from facebook using a phone on WP8.1 and adding them to yahoo account and a gmail account syncing the whole lot with each other and then remerging them all again on the pc. i'm not sure which step if any was the critical one, i think the yahoo one imported the pics from facebook on WP8.1 but adding the gmail account seemed to cause something on outlook online to reimport but this time from yahoo
  • Anyone else have issues with Gmail Contacts not syncing as of late? I use a Live Account, Work Account and Gmail account. None of my Gmail contacts carried over after doing a clean install of the stable Windows Mobile build.
  • Easier solution for me than I thought, exported gmail contacts as a CSV, imported to live and wiped my contacts prior to this. I finally have a clean contact list.
  • I am having this issue as well after I factory reset my Lumia 830. Gmail Mail and Calendar is syncing, only contacts are not syncing.
  • I'm sure this has been bugging me since before the 17th Nov, on a 650 and acer LJP. Can recive mail but can't send and same wrong email opening bug as Mestiphal.
  • oh wow, phew I wasn't affected, at least I don't think so, I was getting my gmail, microsoft and imap accounts ok. Canada 950xl here.
  • This issue is spotty. I have 3 accounts and it has affected 2 of them. Thankfully not all of them, so maybe you are one of the lucky ones to not have your accounts touched by this.
  • One weird thing that happened a few times over the past few weeks is when I open a mail account, it opens to the very bottom of the list. So I can be a very long scroll back up to the top! Especially that i sync 3 months worth lol. It never persisted for very long and when I did care about it again the next day it was fine. Nothing reproducible
  • Oeps
  • We have many problems with Outlook.com in The Netherlands. Solved it by deleting Skype preview on all my devices.
  • That may explain why I couldn't get my wife's GS6 to add our shared outlook account yesterday...
  • Yep.
  • Yeah I've been having issues,even contacted my web hosting provider and we were on long support call,deleted mail account,added back,no avail.good to know it's outlook issue and fix on way
  • What is the calender app in the picture ? Looking great...
  • Curious myself.
  • Yes! Someone please respond! OP??
  • Weird, I posted an answer but it disappeared. This is Tiles for Outlook (an old version by the way) :)
  • My outlook calendar app is not updating I have to unpin the app and then pin it back...
  • The Calendar app on my phone loses the live tile every day at 12AM, during the date change. Has been that way for months. Resizing each morning "fixes" the problem. Feedback in Microsoft's community forums is atrocious.
  • Same here, and its known issue for months, yet Microsoft not fixing it! and WindowsCentral also not highlighting this issue?
  • Been happening way longer than Thursday and I'm in the U.S.
  • Whats this calendar app in pic?
  • I haven't heard of that issue, but this current problem is unacceptable. Businesses are relying on this stuff. MS just doesn't get it and never will.
  • It's Tiles for Outlook.
  • Outlook.com is a total mess.  I'm betting that MSFT doesn't get this syncing thing fixed.  It has been broken forever. I use the Office Outlook application to connect to my Outlook.com account.  Sounds like a great thing but if I make a change in the Outlook application on my calendar or address book, the changes take forever to propogate through the system.  Is it minutes to show up on my 950XL?  Nope, it is hours and sometimes days for a calendar or address book change to show up.  The strange thing is that changes to my gmail calendar show up almost instantly.  It has never been longer than a minute and that is for the desktop application AND on my 950XL.  Heck, I get iCalendar invites to my gmail account and they also show up instantly. As strange as it sounds, GoDaddy is offering Office365 with Outlook for new small businesses.  What are they trying to do, put them out of business?!?!  What company can run their business on a service that takes orders of magnitude longer to update than their competitors.  What individual wants to have a friend update an event that day and hope that their calendars get updated. I'm not holding my breath that MSFT will fix this issue.  It has been around forever and I think MSFT must be taking pride in how long they can keep their system broken.  They are probably relying on the people who put, "Delete Outlook.com and sign up for XYZ Service" on their calendars to forget to change their email/calendar/address book accounts because it takes so long to propogate through the system.
  • Someone wrote on Microsoft community: I looked at my contacts and found 11.000 new contacts from Twitter. Tried to delete them but Microsoft wound let me. Others lost all there contacts and all their mail. And Microsoft has no answers...... We will look at it..... For months already.
  • I'm totally done with my personal outlook.com account now. I moved to Gmail and couldn't be happier!
  • I'm in the US, but this has been bugging me.
  • was not working since Friday for me with Outlook2016 client. working again hopefully finally fixed.
  • Your comment made me try and it works! Amen!!!
  • Does anyone know if this fix will also resolve the issue of saving sent items when sending from the Outlook App using a connected account?
  • What app is that that shows on the bottom left of that screen shot? the one that shows the day on the left and appointments on the right. Oooop! guess I should have read through the thread. True Calendar 8 or Simple Calendar. Thanks to those who already posted the answer.
  • None of those. This is my Tiles for Outlook app :-)
  • Wow. My calendar app does not look like that one in the screenshot
  • Give it a try, it's called Tiles for Outlook (sorry moderators, you force me to do some promotion here by not telling what my app is ^_^)
  • It started way before Thursday. I used to miss a weeks worth of emails. Oddly this only ever happened on my Gmail account
  • This has been happening on a couple of accounts for me and, I believe, is related to the update to the new Outlook.com experience. I think that something in the mailbox upgrade process has screwed up the sync. I could be wrong but it would be interesting to know if others that have been affected have also been upgraded.
  • At last! Had sync issues ever since an update a month or so ago. Put it down to migration to new servers and reported feedback like many others. Community site & MSFT support no use at all.
  • Has been having that issue for 2 months...i missed alot of mails
  • Didn't notice any issues on my consumer accounts, but some business accounts I've had to manually force a sync to get new mail on some devices. No idea if it's related but hopefully
  • they still havent fixed the live tile bug.
  • Those syncing issues drove me nuts for about two weeks at the end of October so I switched to the mail service of my country provider. Bye bye outlook.com that service was awful and unbearable...
  • I've been having all sorts of issues with Outlook 2016, Outlook.com, Nine (EAS email app for Android), and DigiCal (calendar app for Android), to play nice these past couple of weeks. Spent a few hours with a MS tech trying to fix it then it got bumped to a level 2 guy, but before he called the next day, things seemed like they were fixed, but right after that, everything went to hell again. The calendars were showing random events in triplicate, other items went missing altogether, and some got their dates changed. I went as far as deleting all apps and accounts but that didn't quite work. So far, these last few days things have been OK. One thing: I've noticed that each app connects to a different EAS server, which is dumb, and the tech mentioned something about Microsoft was consolidating everything.
  • I believe that on a desktop, the server is set to outlook.office365.com, and on mobile devices (including laptops), eas.outlook.com. Which is strange because Microsoft sent an advisory to change Outlook 2016 settings (on both desktops and laptops) to use Exchange Online (on which outlook.office365.com runs).
  • It's a mess: I've deleted the mail account (Control Panel>User Accounts>Mail), three times, and three times after getting a new profile setup, Outlook 2016 has had a different email server. Additionally, the color-coding I use for various events in the calendar, keep getting changed. Sometimes everything's one color, other times it's a mix. Changing it online in Outlook.com sometimes chages Outlook 2016 entries. I had to go through almost every recurring event (mostly birthdays and the like), delete them, then add them back. This was needed because I was seeing certain events triplicated and I couldn't figure out what app was causing the issue. Oh, and right before all of this, every single contact lost its contact photo, then after a few weeks, some came back. I sure hope MS doesn't make software for NASA or anything else where lives are on the line.
  • Nothing is resolved. I have sync problems on my Lumia 950 since end of October. Decents of copies of the same messages on live/Hotmail account. And it's still not working properly.