Outlook.com is having hiccups

Having trouble with your Outlook.com account this morning? You're not alone.

As of 9:34 p.m. PT Tuesday, some type of technical glitch has been affecting Microsoft's Outlook.com email service and various email clients. The company has acknowledged the problem on its service status page and has been promising to fix it:

We are aware that users of the following mail clients are experiencing issues syncing and sending email. We are working on the issue and expect resolution in the next 24 hours. -- Windows Live Mail -- Outlook Connector -- MSN Premium client -- Windows Phone 8.1 -- Windows 8 Mail Client.
In two more updates during the night, Microsoft said that it was still working on the problem. But apparently the issue is tougher than expected to solve.

In a later update posted at 1:53 a.m. PT on Wednesday, Microsoft said that "fixing the problem is taking longer than we hoped." The company apologized for the "lengthy interruption in service."

Just before 10 a.m. PT, a Microsoft spokesperson sent CNET the following statement: "A small number of customers may have had difficulty sending and syncing email. We are currently rolling out an update and we expect all services to be fully restored soon. For further updates please visit https://status.live.com."

In 2013, Microsoft started phasing out its Hotmail service in favor of Outlook.com as a way to shake up its email service and offer competition to other mail clients such as Gmail. Outlook.com allows you to send and receive email using other accounts, offers email forwarding and lets you group your email by conversation thread. But the service has been hit by periodic outages since its inception.