this afternoon my outlook stopped working and I can't get to any of my emails

Check Microsoft’s Service Health Status first; if Outlook.com is not shown as healthy, this is a service incident and the supported action is to wait until the status returns to green before trying again.^1^

Public outage reports currently show problems with Microsoft Outlook in the United States, consistent with the “Downloading your messages” stall that began around 1:30 PM Central Time. However, Microsoft has not published a repair time for this exact symptom, so a reliable completion estimate is not available.^2^

What to do now

1. Open Microsoft’s Outlook.com known-issues page and select the Service Health Status link.^3^
2. If the service status is not green, monitor that page for recovery updates. Reinstalling Outlook or changing mailbox settings would not address a service outage.
3. If the status is green, test Outlook.com in another browser, preferably Microsoft Edge.
4. If it works in the other browser, disable AdBlock or uBlock for Outlook.com and refresh the page. Microsoft documents these extensions as a cause of messages timing out, loading slowly, or failing to load. Firefox add-ons can also prevent the inbox from loading.^3^
5. If it fails in every browser while the service status is green, sign in to Outlook.com, select ? in the upper-right corner, search for cannot access email, and use Still need help? → Yes → Chat with a support agent in your web browser.

Your location in Paducah does not provide enough information to estimate restoration; the Microsoft status page is the authoritative place for incident progress and recovery.

References

1. How to sign in to Hotmail | Microsoft Support
2. Microsoft Outlook down? Current problems and outages | US
3. Fixes or workarounds for recent issues on Outlook.com | Microsoft Support