Microsoft’s Outlook spam email filters are broken for many right now

Update February 20, 2:04 PM ET: According to Microsoft’s Service Status page the problem appears to be resolved. Our original story appears below.

Microsoft’s Outlook spam filters appear to be broken for many users today. I woke up to more than 20 junk messages in my Focused Inbox in Outlook this morning, and spam emails have kept breaking through on an hourly basis today. Many Outlook users in Europe have also spotted the same thing, with some heading to Twitter to complain about waking up to an inbox full of spam messages.

Most of the messages that are making it into Outlook users’ inboxes are very clearly spam. Today’s issues are particularly bad, after weeks of the Outlook spam filter progressively deteriorating for me personally.

If you’re also getting inundated with spam right now, it might be worth temporarily disabling notifications for any email app on your phone that’s connected to your Outlook personal account. That will stop your phone waking up constantly to show you a notification about a spam email you definitely don’t care about.

We’ve reached out to Microsoft to comment on the Outlook spam issues and we’ll update you accordingly once the company is able to respond.