Microsoft Outlook is a miserable piece of software on Earth, but also in space, too.
This week, NASA's Artemis II mission kicked off, which will take a U.S. manned space craft around the lunar body for the first time in fifty years. The mission is designed to test new technology and prep for future missions to actually land on the Moon itself, but one piece of earthly tech got an unexpected test along the way too.
Microsoft has been under fire for its software quality over the past few years. Everything from Office apps, the Xbox PC app, to Windows 11 itself, Microsoft has pledged a return to quality control in its PC suite. Things have gotten so bad, Microsoft is also building a "dream team" of developers to build native Windows apps, ditching web-based options. The fixes couldn't come soon enough for the Artemis II mission though, sadly.
In a clip going viral on X, an astronaut from the Artemis II live feed can be heard saying, "I see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one is working," before asking ground control to "remote in" and fix them.
Yes... In case anyone was wondering, Microsoft still sucks in space. pic.twitter.com/vf5b0lQgc7April 2, 2026
Indeed, Microsoft split the Outlook client on Windows into several different versions, frustratingly, named Outlook, Outlook (PWA) and Outlook (Classic) on my PC. The classic version is the native OG app with POP3 and IMAP features you might remember from the 90s. The more recent versions are progressive web apps, and are notoriously poor.
My colleague Zac Bowden recently posted the below video showing just how long it takes for Microsoft Outlook to open an email from a notification. I frankly had no idea you could even open an email from a notification, my assumption was that it simply didn't work — I never even bothered to wait for it to time out.
I cannot believe it still takes this long for Outlook on Windows to display an email when you select it from a notification. It's INFURIATING! pic.twitter.com/8VsxttyOfVApril 2, 2026
Microsoft Outlook is a huge staple of Microsoft's productivity suite, and has been there for many decades in various forms and permutations. The latest iteration stripped away much of the functionality and speed of its UWP native predecessor, opting instead for a sluggish web-based version that rarely functions as advertised. The mobile versions are crammed with useless AI features on the consumer side too, as part of Microsoft's broader haphazard push to find ways to make AI worth using.
There are tons of reasons why Outlook might've failed in space, it might not necessarily have been Outlook's fault, but it is a comical glimpse into the wider reputation Microsoft's software suite has earned for itself: Outlook should be waaaaaaaaaay better than it is.
With Microsoft's focus now returning to quality on Windows 11, will Outlook and other notoriously poor Windows built-in apps get a space-worthy glow up? Only time will tell. Until then, perhaps NASA will end up swapping to Gmail instead.
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