We can’t connect to Outlook at the moment. Please try again later.

Hi Outlook team,

I have been getting this same message ‘We can’t connect to Outlook at the moment. Please try again later’ on and off for six or seven months. I assumed it was my connection but it got more and more frequent until two weeks ago when it became permanent. Unlike many of the other people encountering the same problem, it’s not that I can’t log in, or because I can’t read my inbox. I am able to log in and find this message waiting every time before I have even begun to navigate my account. Despite the fact that my account will receive emails and I can open them, it will not send any kind of outgoing message. I have phoned Microsoft and had it explained to me that there is no phone support for the free account holder like me. I have followed their directions on various websites and encountered essentially the same problem every time. I have a Sony Vaio VGN-NS20E.

·         Status.live.com has a green tick by every section and the phrase ‘running normally’ for everything. I have sent a Service Status report with Outlook not being able to send emails as the selected problem on the site ‘status.live.com/report’.

·         Support.microsoft.com the first time led me to ‘Get live help’ which I selected. I was then prompted by the technician on the phone to select ‘Microsoft account’ which then led me to a page where I could start a live chat. After selecting ‘Start Chat’ a message said that I had ‘Waiting time; 1 minute’, but nothing happened for 25 minutes, then the page refreshed itself and a new message said ‘Sorry, the page you requested is not available’.  So I have tried again several times and now am only able to get as far as the ‘get live help’ page. It will not let me navigate beyond this as nothing happens when I select ‘Microsoft Account’ as before. If I am lucky enough for the page to register my selection, the next page is not the ‘Start Chat’ page as hoped but ‘Sorry, the page you requested is not available’ with every consecutive attempt.

·         I have cleared the cache as directed on your Microsoft Community help page yet the problem persists, and Chrome my browser is up to date.

·         I have logged in with different browsers and from different computers and the problem persists.

·         It is not a problem connecting to the internet as I have been able to access every other page/website attempted throughout the duration of this problem and continue to do so.

I have screenshots of all the above. I can find no new advice other than the suggestions already attempted listed above. I have spent time and money on three very long phone calls to be directed to this help page at ‘answers.microsoft.com’, I anticipate a swift resolution.