Microsoft has today disclosed its plan of removing Google and Facebook chat from its email service Outlook.com. The support will be discontinued within next couple of weeks, as per an e-mail by Outlook to its customer.

The official notification by Microsoft says that the company is removing the Google Talk integration ‘due to Google’s decision to discontinue the chat protocol used by the Google Talk platform’. No reasons have been disclosed as to why Facebook chat support too will be discontinued.

“We understand that this may disappoint some of our customers, but we hope [...]

Matching Google at its best game, Microsoft has brought a fully featured version of Outlook to iOS and Android today. The new app is based on the application it acquired, called Acompli, last December.

Julia White, General Manager of Microsoft Office said that the Acompli team has already been integrated into the Outlook team, and today’s launch is a direct result of that. Acompli aimed to set itself apart from other email clients by focusing on multitasking. The app included a built-in calendar and features that made it easier to find attachments and contact information without [...]

After the release of the long awaited Android L and its associated Material Design, it seems Google wants to take its feature a step further. Android Police has accessed Gmail 5.0 app for Android and discovered support for Yahoo and Outlook accounts. This will be a big blow to the independent apps of these mail clients; people might find it more convenient to access all their accounts from one place.

The new Android OS was appreciated for its ease of use and simplified view with updated iconography and tweaked buttons. A companion video shows how the new update keeps the interface similar to what we have gotten used to, [...]

During this week, Outlook.com suffered from an outage causing users to not be able to read their emails nor could they retrieve their files stored on Microsoft’s SkyDrive service. Today, Microsoft has offered an apology and an explanation on why this outage happened.

The company posted a message on its service status page to describe the problems, explaining that it was all just a glitch caused by a caching service.

Here’s the full message posted by Microsoft on the recent Outlook.com outage:

“This incident was a result of a failure in a caching service that interfaces with devices using Exchange [...]