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What to Do When Microsoft 365 Is Down ​

Applies to: Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
Article Type: Informational
Last Updated: 2026-07-29

Summary ​

An outage playbook for the hour when Outlook stops sending and Teams will not connect. This article shows you how to tell a real service outage from a problem on your own machine, how to report it usefully, how to keep working while it lasts, and what to verify once service comes back.

Prerequisites ​

  • A Microsoft 365 work account.
  • A second device on a different connection — a phone on cellular data is ideal — so you have an independent path to test with.
  • No admin rights required.

Instructions ​

1. Rule Out Your Own Machine First ​

Two minutes of local checks stop you reporting a personal problem as a company outage — the single most common cause of wasted tickets on an outage day.

  1. Open a site that has nothing to do with Microsoft — a news site will do. If it does not load, your internet connection is the problem, not Microsoft.
  2. Open Outlook in a browser at outlook.office.com and sign in. If the web version works while the desktop app does not, the service is running and the fault is on your computer.
  3. Check the same app on your phone over cellular data. Turn Wi-Fi off on the phone first, so you are testing a genuinely different network. Working on the phone and failing on the laptop points at your laptop or the office network.
  4. Disconnect the VPN and try again. A dead VPN tunnel produces error messages that look exactly like a service outage.
  5. Look for a sign-in prompt hiding behind another window. An expired password or a pending multi-factor approval stalls every Microsoft 365 app at once and looks identical to an outage from the outside.
  6. Ask the person nearest you. This is the fastest test in the list and people skip it.

Verification: Two or more colleagues seeing the same failure, at the same time, on different computers is the signature of a real outage. One person failing while everyone else works is an account or device issue — start with How to Fix "Something Went Wrong" Error in Microsoft 365.

2. Confirm It on an Independent Source ​

Check something outside your own network before you draw a conclusion.

  • The Microsoft 365 service status page at status.cloud.microsoft is the authoritative public source. It lists each service — Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business — with its current state, and posts updates as Microsoft investigates.
  • Your IT team sees more than you can. The Service health page inside the Microsoft 365 admin center is admin-only and carries tenant-specific advisories with an incident number such as MO123456. That number is what to ask for: "Is there an active advisory for this? Please share the incident ID and the current estimate."
  • Third-party outage trackers such as Downdetector show a spike in user reports within minutes. They are crowd reports rather than fact, so treat a spike as a strong hint and the Microsoft page as the answer.
  • Microsoft posts on social media from its Microsoft 365 status account during significant incidents, often before the status page text is updated.

Note: Reach these from your phone on cellular data. If the outage has taken out your company's network path, the status page loads on a connection that does not depend on it.

3. Report It Once, With the Right Details ​

An outage generates hundreds of identical tickets, and every one of them takes time away from the people fixing it.

Before you report anything, check the places your organization posts notices: the intranet banner, the IT announcements channel in Teams, a status page, or an all-staff email. If a notice is already up, you are done — add nothing.

If nobody has reported it, send one ticket for your team and include:

  • The app and version — Outlook desktop, Teams web, OneDrive sync.
  • The exact error text, copied rather than paraphrased, in the ticket body.
  • The time it started, to the minute.
  • How many people around you are affected.
  • Whether the browser version of the same app works.
  • What you already tried from section 1.

How to Submit an Effective IT Support Ticket covers the format your help desk wants.

What not to do while a service is down:

  • Do not reinstall Microsoft 365 or run an online repair. You will finish the reinstall and still be looking at the same outage, having lost an hour.
  • Do not delete and recreate your Outlook profile. Rebuilding a mailbox cache over a degraded connection takes hours and can lose locally drafted mail.
  • Do not unlink or reset OneDrive sync. Files that have not uploaded yet are the ones at risk.
  • Do not change your password to see whether that helps. It will not, and it invalidates every signed-in session you still have.

4. Keep Working: Files You Already Have ​

The files on your computer do not know that a cloud service is unwell.

  1. Open File Explorer and select OneDrive - YourCompany in the navigation pane on the left. Your synced work files are there, on the local disk.
  2. Read the icon beside each file. A green circle with a white tick means the file is on this device and opens now. A blue cloud means it is stored online only and will not open until service returns.
  3. Open and edit the local files as normal. Word, Excel, and PowerPoint save straight to disk, and the changes upload on their own once sync recovers.
  4. Save anything new inside the OneDrive folder rather than on the Desktop. It queues for upload automatically and you avoid the "which copy is current?" mess afterwards.
  5. Resist emailing copies to yourself as a backup. During an outage the mail does not leave, and you end up merging versions later.

Tip: The blue-cloud problem is worth fixing before the next outage. Right-click the folders you rely on and select Always keep on this device so they are physically present. How to Use OneDrive Files On-Demand explains the settings, and How to Work Offline in Microsoft 365 covers the wider preparation.

5. Keep Working: Mail, Meetings, and Chat ​

Outlook and your phone give you more room than most people expect.

Mail. The Outlook desktop app in cached mode keeps a local copy of roughly the last twelve months of your mailbox. During an outage you can still read that mail, search within it, and write replies. Sent messages land in the Outbox and go out by themselves when the connection returns. The status bar at the bottom right of the Outlook window shows Disconnected or Trying to connect — that is the app being honest, not broken. If it reads Working Offline, the app has been switched offline manually and needs switching back: see How to Fix "Working Offline" in Outlook.

Meetings. When Teams is unreachable, fall back deliberately rather than waiting:

  • Dial the phone number in the meeting invitation if the organizer's tenant has audio conferencing.
  • Move the call to a plain phone call and send the agenda by text message.
  • Ask the organizer to reopen the meeting in an alternative tool — a Zoom or Google Meet link takes thirty seconds to create and is unaffected by a Microsoft incident.

An independent path. Your phone on cellular data reaches Microsoft over a completely different route from the office network. Mobile Outlook and mobile Teams sometimes keep working when the desktop apps do not, which is enough to send the message that unblocks other people. If you need that connection on the laptop, How to Use Your Phone as a Wi-Fi Hotspot for Your Laptop has the steps.

6. When Service Returns, Check These Four Things ​

Recovery is not finished when the apps reconnect. Spend two minutes confirming that the work you did during the outage actually landed.

  1. Empty the Outbox. Open Outlook, press F9 to run Send/Receive All Folders, then open the Outbox folder. It must be empty and the messages must appear in Sent Items. Anything left behind with a red exclamation mark needs opening and sending again.
  2. Confirm OneDrive finished syncing. Select the OneDrive cloud icon in the system tray at the right end of the taskbar. The panel reads Your files are up to date when it is done. A red circle with a white cross, or a message about files needing attention, means at least one file did not upload — open it and resolve the conflict before you close the laptop.
  3. Reopen the documents you edited. If a colleague edited the same file from a working machine, check File > Info > Version History in Word or Excel and confirm the current version contains your changes rather than only theirs.
  4. Check that your Teams messages posted. Messages typed during an outage can sit with a red exclamation mark beside them. Select the mark and choose Try again so the message actually reaches the channel.

Meeting recordings, transcripts, and search indexes are the slowest things to come back — they can lag hours behind the "service restored" notice. That delay is the tail of the incident, not a new fault.

Troubleshooting ​

WARNING

Do not reinstall Microsoft 365, rebuild your Outlook profile, unlink OneDrive, or change your password while a service outage is in progress. These actions cannot fix a problem in Microsoft's datacentre, they take the longest to undo, and unlinking sync during an outage is the one thing on the list that can genuinely lose unsaved work.

Symptom / ErrorPotential CauseSolution
Everything Microsoft fails at once, on every deviceExpired password or a pending sign-in approvalSign in at outlook.office.com in a browser and complete any password or verification prompt, then reopen the desktop apps.
Web versions work, desktop apps do notLocal app or network problem, not an outageThe service is running. Work from the browser and follow How to Fix "Something Went Wrong" Error in Microsoft 365.
A file shows a blue cloud icon and will not openThe file is stored online onlyIt stays unavailable until service returns. Mark folders Always keep on this device before the next outage.
Outlook says Working Offline and the service is fineOffline mode was switched on manuallyOn the Send / Receive tab, select Work Offline to switch it back off.
Mail sits in the Outbox after service is restoredSend/Receive has not run since reconnectingPress F9. If a message stays put, open it, close it, and send it again — a large attachment is the usual culprit.
Teams messages show a red exclamation markThe message never reached the serviceSelect the exclamation mark and choose Try again. Copy the text elsewhere first if it matters.