Microsoft outage knocks out Teams, Outlook, Xbox Live

A widespread Microsoft ↗ 0.52% outage disrupted access to core productivity and gaming services on Thursday morning, leaving thousands of users in North America unable to connect to Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Copilot, and Xbox Live.

Services Down Across the Board

Reports began flooding outage-tracking site Downdetector just after 10:30 a.m. ET on July 23, with SharePoint accounting for 78 percent of complaints, followed by Excel at 11 percent and Admin Centre at 6 percent. Microsoft acknowledged the disruption, stating: "We've confirmed some users in North America are experiencing issues accessing or using various Microsoft 365 services. We're analyzing service telemetry and diagnostic data to isolate the source of impact."Geo News

The company's Service Health Status page reflected "service degradation" across multiple services via certain network routes, and directed administrators to incident MO1437424 through the Microsoft 365 admin center for further details. Affected services include Microsoft 365, Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, the Microsoft Store, and Power Automate.Geo News

Xbox Live also went down during the same window. Microsoft's Xbox tech support posted on X: "We are aware that some users are encountering errors when attempting to connect to Xbox services and features. Our engineers are actively working to mitigate the issue."Windows Central According to the Xbox Support website, the outage affected Store and subscriptions, Friends and social activity, Cloud gaming and remote play, Games and gaming, and Apps and mobile across Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Cloud Gaming-compatible handheldsWindows Central. The timing proved especially frustrating for gamers attempting to access Halo: Campaign Evolved's early access launchWindows Central.

Separate Azure Outage Compounds Problems

A parallel issue struck Microsoft's Azure cloud platform in the West US region. Beginning at approximately 14:44 UTC on July 23, customers experienced intermittent connectivity failures, increased latency, or difficulty accessing Azure services. Impacted Azure services included Application Gateway, Azure Kubernetes Service, Azure Firewall, ExpressRoute, VPN Gateway, Power BI Embedded, and more.azure.status.microsoft+1

Microsoft said it had identified the likely cause and was "actively deploying mitigation actions," with its last update at 18:12 UTC noting that it was "closely monitoring service recovery" as fixes rolled out.azure.status.microsoft

No Firm Resolution Timeline

As of early Thursday afternoon, Microsoft had not provided a firm timeline for full restoration of services. Downdetector also logged access problems during the same window for other major platforms including Amazon Web Services Amazon.com, Inc. ↘ 2.24%, Cloudflare ↘ 0.19%, and OpenAI, suggesting the network issues may extend beyond Microsoft's own infrastructure. The cause of the Microsoft 365 disruption remains under investigation.Geo News