Google resolves 10-hour issue that prevented Gmail from syncing with Outlook

If you typically access your Hotmail or Outlook account using the Gmail app, there’s a reason you probably didn’t see any new emails last night: Google had an issue syncing with Microsoft’s servers. According to Google’s status page, the company had been working to figure out what was wrong since around noon ET on Wednesday, before fixing it several hours later.

At 9:57PM Wednesday evening, Google said it had resolved the issue. “The Gmail sync issue with Microsoft servers when using IMAP is now resolved. Thank you for your patience while we resolved the problem.”

At first glance it seemed like the partial outage would be a niche issue — Outlook has its own app, so who’s using the Gmail one? But for Android phones the Gmail app is the default mail client, and it encourages you to add email addresses from any service, not just Google’s. If you went that route, you could still check your messages by going to the site on your phone or computer’s browser.

During the outage, trying to load your Outlook or Hotmail inbox in the Gmail app would either show your old emails, or an error message saying that there was a problem syncing the folder and asking you to try again later. The issue was affecting “all device platforms,” according to Google.

Early on, Google said the issue was with Microsoft’s IMAP servers and that Microsoft had acknowledged that its service is also not syncing with “other large mail providers” as well. However, the Outlook Twitter account seemingly contradicted this by responding to customer complaints saying “we’re not tracking any issues on our end.”

Update February 23rd, 8:21AM ET: Added confirmation that the issue is now resolved.