All Microsoft Services Are Currently Down

If you're having trouble accessing certain services like Microsoft Teams or Outlook, you're not alone. As of early Thursday afternoon, many of Microsoft's biggest apps and services were experiencing downtime. According to Downdetector, which tracks user reports of issues with websites and platforms, Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, Teams, and OneDrive were all experiencing issues.

Which Microsoft services are affected by the outage?

Looking specifically at Outlook, Microsoft's email service currently has hundreds of thousands of user reports, signaling a major issue somewhere in Microsoft's pipeline. The reports have "slowed" since their peak earlier this afternoon, but Downdetector is still showing over 50,000 reports coming in every 15 minutes.

When I first published this article, I couldn't even load Microsoft 365's status page. (I've reported on many service outages, but I can't recall a time when a service's status page was also down.) The page now says "Service degradation on Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)," and Microsoft says the following services may be affected: Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft Copilot 365, Microsoft Defender XDR.

What's causing the current Microsoft outage?

At the moment, the root cause isn't clear. Microsoft has been posting to its Microsoft 365 Status account on X since 12:54 p.m. ET. The company had confirmed that some of its infrastructure was experiencing elevated load, which it said was likely contributing to the issues. Microsoft then said it was pausing all deployments and moving traffic from affected infrastructure, and that it found that a number of its servers were unexpectedly unavailable after failing health checks.

As of 3:19 p.m., the company thinks a specific component responsible for processing server health may be the reason the system is failing health checks. Microsoft said an alternative service health check method successfully restarted some of the affected servers. As of 4:40 p.m., the company is actively restarting and validating affected servers to bring them back to service. We'll have to see if these mitigations fix the issue swiftly.

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Microsoft isn't the only company with connection issues today. Downdetector is showing user reports with Google services like Gmail, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare. While we could be looking at something more widespread, those reports pale in comparison to users complaining of Microsoft issues, so, for the time being, it seems more likely to be a Microsoft-specific issue. I'll keep this article updated with the latest news.