All Microsoft Services Are Currently Unavailable.
If you’re experiencing issues accessing services like Microsoft Teams or Outlook, you’re not alone. By early Thursday afternoon, many of Microsoft’s largest apps and services were experiencing outages. According to Downdetector , which tracks user reports of website and platform issues, issues were observed in Microsoft 365, Teams, Copilot, and OneDrive.
Which Microsoft services are affected by this outage?
Looking specifically at Outlook , Microsoft’s email service is currently receiving hundreds of thousands of messages from users, indicating a serious issue somewhere in Microsoft’s data processing system. The number of messages has “slowed” from the peak reached earlier today, but Downdetector still shows over 50,000 messages every 15 minutes.
When I first published this article, I couldn’t even load the Microsoft 365 status page. (I’ve reported many service outages, but I don’t recall a time when the service status page was also unavailable.) Now the page displays the message “Service quality is degrading in 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 is causing the current outage at Microsoft?
The root cause is currently unclear. Microsoft posted messages on its Microsoft 365 Status account at 12:54 PM ET. The company confirmed that part of its infrastructure was experiencing increased load, which it said was likely contributing to the issues. Microsoft then stated that it was pausing all deployments and rerouting traffic from the affected infrastructure, and that it had discovered that several of its servers had unexpectedly become unavailable after failing health checks.
As of 3:19 PM, the company believes that a specific component responsible for processing server health data may be the cause of system health check failures. Microsoft reported that an alternative method for checking service health has successfully restarted some of the affected servers. As of 4:40 PM, the company is actively restarting and checking the health of the affected servers to restore their operation. It remains to be seen how quickly these measures resolve the issue.
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Microsoft isn’t the only company experiencing connectivity issues today. Downdetector shows user reports of problems with Google services like Gmail, Amazon Web Services, and Cloudflare. While we may be dealing with a larger problem, these reports pale in comparison to user complaints about Microsoft’s issues, so for now, it seems more likely that this is a Microsoft-specific issue. I’ll update this article as more information becomes available.