Microsoft 365 Down? Outage Hits Teams, SharePoint, Store and More as Thousands Report Access Problems Today

A widespread outage affecting Microsoft 365 disrupted access to Teams, SharePoint, Outlook, the Microsoft Store and several other services Thursday morning, with thousands of users across the country reporting problems logging in or completing basic tasks.

According to outage-tracking service Downdetector, complaints began surging just after 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. By 11:11 a.m., Downdetector had recorded 2,403 reports specifically tied to Microsoft 365, sharply above the service’s normal baseline of roughly 29 reports. That number climbed further as the morning progressed, with more than 6,000 users reporting problems with Microsoft 365 shortly after, and total reports eventually surpassing 8,000 across Microsoft’s broader suite of services.

Which services were affected

The outage spread across a wide range of Microsoft products. Downdetector showed elevated reports for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Excel, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, Outlook, OneDrive, Copilot, Azure, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Store. Among the specific complaints tracked around 11:11 a.m., SharePoint accounted for 78% of reported issues, followed by Excel at 11% and the Admin Center at 6%.

Some users also reported difficulty downloading Windows updates or installing Microsoft Office applications, according to posts shared on Reddit. Separately, users of Microsoft Teams described being unable to save new meetings to their calendars, even though existing meetings could still be edited and impromptu meetings could still be started, a specific glitch that outage-tracking service StatusGator noted had actually been affecting some users for roughly 12 hours prior to Thursday’s broader disruption.

Microsoft’s response

Microsoft acknowledged the disruption Thursday morning. “We’re investigating reports of issues with Microsoft 365 services,” the company posted on social media platform X at 11:24 a.m. Eastern time. The company directed system administrators to a specific incident listing, MO1437424, within the Microsoft 365 admin center for additional information and ongoing updates. Microsoft’s own Service Health Status page reflected the acknowledgment, showing a status of “service degradation” for Microsoft 365 as of Thursday morning.

As of early afternoon, Microsoft had not provided a specific timeline for resolving the outage or disclosed a root cause, with several outlets covering the disruption noting that both the cause and expected duration of the interruption remained unknown.

A pattern of recurring disruptions

Thursday’s outage adds to a string of Microsoft 365 disruptions over the past year. A Microsoft 365 outage in January affected thousands of users for several hours before being resolved, and a separate outage specifically affecting Microsoft Outlook lasted for hours in April. Microsoft Teams also experienced a significant standalone outage in recent days, going down for several hours due to what the company described as a broken connection to an internal storage service introduced during a recent software deployment.

That earlier Teams-specific outage, which primarily affected users overnight when much of Europe and Asia were offline, illustrated how the timing of a disruption can significantly shape its real-world impact even when the underlying technical problem is serious. Thursday’s outage, by contrast, struck squarely during U.S. business hours, meaning far more users were actively relying on the affected services at the moment problems began.

Broader context around Microsoft

The outage comes at a notable moment for Microsoft more broadly. Earlier this month, the company filed a formal WARN notice disclosing 605 permanent layoffs at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, effective Sept. 4, part of a broader wave of workforce reductions the company has carried out this year. While there is no indication the layoffs are connected to Thursday’s technical issues, the timing has drawn additional attention to the company’s operations during a period of significant organizational change.

Downdetector also recorded elevated outage reports Thursday for several other major online services around the same general timeframe, including Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare, OpenAI, Fortnite and Dropbox, though those separate reports were limited to a few thousand complaints each and appeared unrelated to Microsoft’s specific outage.

Why these outages happen

Large-scale cloud service disruptions like Thursday’s typically stem from issues within a provider’s own backend infrastructure, ranging from faulty software deployments to configuration errors affecting how different services communicate with one another. Because so many Microsoft 365 products, including Teams, SharePoint, Outlook and OneDrive, share common underlying infrastructure, a single technical fault can often cascade across multiple, seemingly unrelated services simultaneously, which appears consistent with the broad range of products affected Thursday.

What affected users can do

For users experiencing ongoing issues, Microsoft’s guidance directs system administrators to check the Microsoft 365 admin center for the specific incident number associated with Thursday’s outage, where the company is expected to post updates as its investigation continues. Individual users without administrator access are generally advised to monitor Microsoft’s official status channels and outage-tracking platforms like Downdetector for updates, since there is typically little an individual user can do to resolve a server-side outage on their own.

What we don’t know yet

As of Thursday afternoon, Microsoft had not disclosed what caused the disruption, how many total users were affected globally, or when full service would be restored. Given the company’s history of resolving similar large-scale outages within a matter of hours, a resolution may come relatively quickly, though the exact timeline remains uncertain pending further updates from Microsoft.

What to watch for

Users looking for real-time updates on the status of their Microsoft 365 services are encouraged to check Microsoft’s official Service Health Status page directly or continue monitoring outage-tracking platforms for changes in reported issue volume. Based on the pattern of previous disruptions this year, a formal statement confirming full restoration of services is likely to follow once Microsoft’s engineering teams have identified and resolved the underlying technical issue behind Thursday’s outage.