Can't download my outlook email

Outlook is experiencing a widespread service disruption today, November 13, 2026, and Microsoft has not published a dependable restoration time; monitor the official service-status page and retry Outlook periodically rather than changing your account settings.^1^

What to do now

1. Open Microsoft’s Service Health Status page from the Outlook.com issues page and check the Outlook entry. Microsoft directs users there when Outlook.com cannot be accessed.^2^
2. Try Outlook.com again periodically. Same-day reporting confirms that Outlook and other Microsoft 365 services are affected and that recovery work is underway, but remediation has not proceeded as expected.^3^
3. Because the expected messages are medically important, contact the hospital by telephone or through its patient portal and ask it to use an alternative contact method. Do not rely on Outlook returning by a particular time.

Avoid deleting and re-adding the account, changing the password, or reinstalling Outlook while the service-status page reports an incident. Those actions will not repair a Microsoft-side outage.

If Microsoft reports that Outlook is healthy

If messages still do not appear after service recovery:

• Open Outlook.com and check Junk Email and the Other tab.
• Select Filter → Sort → Date to display the newest messages first.
• Check Settings → Mail → Rules and forwarding settings for anything moving or redirecting incoming mail.
• Check mailbox/cloud storage. If Microsoft cloud storage is full, Outlook cannot receive mail; messages sent while it was full are bounced to the sender and cannot be recovered. Ask the hospital to resend them after space is available.^4^
• If the problem remains, select Help in Outlook.com, enter the issue, scroll to Still need help?, and select Yes to contact support.^4^

References

1. Is Microsoft down? Updates as users report issues with Outlook, 365
2. Fixes or workarounds for recent issues on Outlook.com | Microsoft Support
3. Microsoft Outage LIVE: Microsoft says steps to fix Outlook outage not going 'as expected'
4. Can't send or receive email in Outlook.com | Microsoft Support