Is Microsoft down right now?

1. 1

   Read the live status above.

   If sign-in or Outlook fail for us too, or reports are spiking, it is a Microsoft-side incident.

2. 2

   Work account? Ask for Service health.

   Microsoft posts many incidents only inside the Microsoft 365 admin center, under Health, Service health. Your IT admin can see whether your tenant is affected.

3. 3

   Read the sign-in error code.

   An AADSTS code on the sign-in page almost always means a setting or policy, not an outage. See the table below.

4. 4

   Try another app and browser.

   If Outlook on the web works but the desktop app does not, the app or its cache is the problem. Try an InPrivate window to rule out cookies.

5. 5

   Check your network.

   Corporate VPNs and proxies sometimes block Microsoft endpoints. Try off the VPN, or on mobile data.

Most "Microsoft is down" tickets are not global outages. Narrow it down quickly:

• Service health first. Microsoft 365 admin center, Health, Service health lists active incidents and advisories with IDs (like MO502273) for your tenant.

• Sign-in logs next. Entra admin center, Sign-in logs, shows the exact failure code and which Conditional Access policy applied to a user.

• Recent changes. A new Conditional Access policy, MFA method change or expired certificate in federation can lock out users at once and look like an outage.

• Check your policies are sound. Paste your exported Conditional Access policies into our free Conditional Access analyzer to spot gaps and risky exclusions.

Network changes

In January 2023 a wide-area network routing change cut users off from Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive worldwide for about five hours.

Configuration changes

Bad configuration pushes are behind many Microsoft incidents, including the Azure Front Door event that took down Microsoft 365 web apps in October 2025.

Shared infrastructure

Microsoft 365 runs on Azure and Entra ID. When sign-in or a shared edge service has trouble, many apps fail at the same time.

Gradual rollouts gone wrong

Updates roll out ring by ring; a defect can affect a slice of users before it is caught and rolled back.

The biggest Microsoft 365 incidents and what caused them. Durations are approximate and come from public reporting and official reviews.

• OCT 29, 2025

  Microsoft 365, Xbox and Azure customers hit by Azure Front Door failures for about 8 hours

  An inadvertent configuration change deployed globally because of a defect in deployment safety checks. Source: Parametrix

• JUL 18, 2024

  Microsoft 365 apps and Azure services in Central US disrupted overnight

  A configuration change blocked access between Azure Storage clusters and compute in the Central US region. Source: TechRadar

• JAN 25, 2023

  Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive unreachable worldwide for about 5 hours

  A wide-area network routing change. Source: Redmond Magazine

Every minute our servers request Microsoft 365's main endpoints, resolve login.microsoftonline.com through Cloudflare, Google and microsoft's own nameservers, and read status.cloud.microsoft. We combine that with one-tap user reports, filtered for duplicates and abuse: a spike needs at least 12 reports in 15 minutes from 8 or more different networks.

Built to avoid false alarms: a failed request is retried before it counts, a single bad check never says "down" on its own, and a check that fails for reasons on our side is shown as inconclusive rather than as an outage. Limits: we check from one location, so a regional problem may first show up in user reports. Reports store only the problem type, a country code and anonymous codes that change daily; never your IP address. Protego is independent and not affiliated with Microsoft 365. Last reviewed October 26, 2026.