Is Microsoft 365 down, or is it just you? (living guide)

The 60-second check.

The fastest authoritative answer is status.cloud.microsoft, Microsoft's public status page, which needs no sign-in and updates during major incidents. Each source below answers a different question, so check them in this order.

Tenant-scoped incidents are the trap for small businesses: the public page says all green while Service health shows an advisory that explains exactly what your team is feeling. If anyone in the company has the admin login, that dashboard is worth the 30 seconds.

Down for everyone, or just you? The 4-step test.

Four checks, about 4 minutes, and you will know whether the problem is Microsoft, your network, or one machine. Run them in order and stop at the first step that works.

1. Try the web app. Email at outlook.office.com, Teams at teams.microsoft.com, files at office.com. If the web version works and the desktop app fails, the service is fine and the problem is your app or device. Head to the fix library instead of waiting for Microsoft.
2. Ask one coworker. If only one person is affected, it is that account or that machine, not an outage. If everyone is affected, keep going.
3. Switch networks. Put the device on a phone hotspot. If everything springs back to life, your office internet, firewall, or DNS is the problem, and your ISP is the call to make, not Microsoft.
4. Check Microsoft's sources. The status page for public incidents, Service health for tenant ones. If you find an incident ID matching your symptoms, it is confirmed: the problem is upstream and local troubleshooting will not fix it.

How to read a Microsoft incident ID.

Microsoft tags every incident with a two-letter service prefix plus a number, like TM1315837 for a Teams issue, and that prefix tells you the blast radius at a glance. These are the prefixes a small business actually sees.

An MO incident is the one that hurts: multiple services degrading together, often including the admin center itself, which is exactly when you most want to check Service health and may not be able to.

You confirmed an outage and you have no IT person. Now what?

The honest answer is that during a confirmed Microsoft outage there is nothing on your machines to fix, and the costly mistakes are the things people do while waiting. Four rules.

1. Capture the incident ID and tell the team. One message saying "Microsoft outage EX1331830, email is delayed for everyone, nothing is wrong on our end" stops a dozen people from rebooting and reinstalling.
2. Change nothing structural. No reinstalls, no bulk password resets, no mail routing changes. During the June 2026 Exchange incident, Microsoft specifically advised against routing workarounds because they complicate recovery once the service comes back.
3. Use the paths that still work. Outages are rarely total. Desktop Outlook down often means outlook.office.com or the phone app still works, because different access paths fail independently.
4. Read the closure notes. When the incident resolves, Service health posts a summary. Check it before undoing anything you changed, and confirm queued mail actually delivered.

When the status page is green but work is still broken.

If Microsoft says all clear and the 4-step test points at your side, the usual suspects are local, and they are the everyday work of IT support. The common ones: office internet or DNS trouble that only shows on your network, a lapsed payment or unassigned license blocking sign-in for one user, a conditional access or MFA lockout after a phone change, and a broken app on one machine, like the Microsoft apps on macOS Tahoe right now. Those are fixable today, no waiting on Microsoft.

Incident log: real Microsoft 365 outages, dated.

A running log of significant incidents as they happen, newest first. Last log update June 12, 2026.

The cloud is usually fine. The everyday breakage is local.

Real Microsoft outages are dramatic but rare, a few significant ones a year. The daily work stoppage is the local stuff: the app that will not launch, the printer, the sync error, the one laptop that fell out of the support window. That is the work Anthony AI does autonomously, in the Microsoft Teams chat your company already uses, with Vision remote support when a fix needs hands on the machine: you paste a one-time code, watch every action live, get a full action log in the chat, and the session caps at 20 minutes.

Sources.

Microsoft 365 status page, status.cloud.microsoft, accessed June 12, 2026. · Microsoft 365 Status account on X (@MSFT365Status), incident MO1221364 updates, January 2026. · The Register: Microsoft 365 outage drags on for nearly 10 hours, January 23, 2026. · Microsoft post-incident report on the January 22, 2026 outage (elevated load during North America infrastructure maintenance), January 2026. · TechTimes: Exchange Online outage EX1331830, June 3, 2026. · Microsoft 365 Admin Center incident TM1315837, May 2026. · Windows trade press coverage of the June 11, 2026 Copilot outage.