Microsoft looking into bug affecting Outlook app notifications

Outlook users on Android and iOS devices alike have been dealing with an annoying bug with the latest app update. Users say that they are no longer receiving push notifications from the app. Therefore, they now have to rely on manually opening the Outlook app after intervals to check if they have new emails. Naturally, affected users are not happy with the bug.

This new update went live a couple of days ago for both platforms. It explains why the reports are slowly popping up on platforms like Reddit. What’s strange is that the bug, in some cases, is affecting push notifications only from one account. Here’s how one user described the problem:

I have two account[s] in my outlook Android app, one is working fine with the notification but the other who is the principal account receive no notification at all. The two (second) account have the same notification configuration for all messages. Tried to disable enable, reinstalling the app but the issue still occurs

This indicates that the issue might be more complicated that it seems. Either way, Microsoft did confirm that they are working on the issue. Although, their confirmation about the problem currently only mentions iOS and not Android. Nevertheless, here’s what Microsoft said:

Title: Users’ push notifications fail approximately five percent of the time for any Exchange Online connection method
User impact: Users’ push notifications fail approximately five percent of the time for any Exchange Online connection method.
More info: Most push notification failures are occurring on Outlook for iOS devices.
Current status: We’re reviewing system logs to isolate the origin of this issue.
Scope of impact: Any user may be impacted

Look, the official status page no longer lists this information. Instead, I found it on a university’s outage announcement page. So it’s possible that Microsoft has already deployed a fix. The fix could very likely be a server-side tweak. More importantly, granted the official acknowledgment was for the issue on iOS only, it’s also possible that the bug might persist on Android. I couldn’t find any official post from the company confirming that they resolved the problem.

Nevertheless, if you too are facing an issue with push notifications not working for Outlook after the latest app update, I’d suggest keeping an eye out for any newer updates. Alternatively, you can force stop the app or restart you phone and recheck. These troubleshooting steps, while simple, often help get rid of such bugs.