Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Defender, Purview, and Teams, were down on Thursday. Downdetector, a platform that tracks online outages, showed at least 10,000 reports at the time of writing this story. While Downdetector showed that Amazon Web Services (AWS), its server status page shows no issues.
A view shows a Microsoft logo at Microsoft offices in Issy-les-Moulineaux near Paris, France (REUTERS)Microsoft responds to outage
In a brief statement, Microsoft confirmed the outage. “We’re investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Further information can be found in the admin center under MO1221364,” it said on X, platform formerly known as Twitter.
When will Outlook, Teams, Purview, Defender be back?
Microsoft has not provided a specific Estimated Time of Resolution (ETR) yet. The status remains listed as “Investigating” in Microsoft’s admin center and service dashboards, meaning engineers are still diagnosing and resolving the root cause. Historically, similar outages took several hours to resolve once mitigation actions were applied fully.
Tips while the outage continues
Check the Microsoft 365 Admin Center status (Service Health) if you’re an admin; updates are frequently posted there. Try accessing services later if you see errors; partial service restoration often occurs before full resolution. Be prepared for intermittent connectivity until Microsoft reports a full fix.
Reactions
Several frustrated users reacted to the Microsoft outage. “More than 14,000 users have reported an issue with Microsoft Outlook. Nearly 10,000 users reported problems with Microsoft 365, 1,5000 for the Microsoft Store, and 800 for Microsoft Teams,” one person tweeted.
“There is an unreported Microsoft Office 365/Exchange Online issue right now.. Emails are going out slowly, Nothing incoming. Down Detector showing massive spike in issues the last hour. No word from Microsoft yet,” another user added.
“Looks like @Microsoft365 just started experiencing issues w/ email delivery & other services. Emails getting deferred on connection & delayed,” a third one stated.