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. 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. It's not clear, however, what's causing the problems with Microsoft's services. When I first published this article, I couldn't even load Microsoft 365's status page. Now, as of 2:17 p.m., the page loads. (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.
It's possible the issue goes beyond Microsoft, too. 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.