Microsoft 365 hit by outage knocking out Teams, SharePoint and Excel
Downdetector logged more than 2,400 user reports as Microsoft opened incident MO1437424 and began investigating.
Key points
- Microsoft 365 services including Teams, SharePoint, Excel and the Admin Center went down on the morning of July 23.
- Downdetector recorded 2,403 user reports at 11:11 a.m. ET, roughly 83 times its normal baseline of 29.
- SharePoint drew 78% of complaints, with Excel at 11% and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center at 6%.
- Microsoft has opened incident MO1437424 in the admin center and says it is investigating.
- The cause is not yet public, and there is no indication so far of a security incident.
Microsoft's cloud office suite fell over on Wednesday morning, cutting off staff at businesses around the world from the tools they use to talk, share files and run spreadsheets.
The problems hit Microsoft Teams, the chat and video-calling app, along with SharePoint, which companies use to store shared documents, plus Excel and the Microsoft 365 Admin Center that IT staff rely on to manage user accounts.
Outage tracker Downdetector logged 2,403 user complaints at 11:11 a.m. Eastern Time. Its normal baseline is 29. That is a jump of roughly 83 times the usual noise.
SharePoint took the brunt of it. The document-sharing service accounted for 78% of the reports. Excel followed at 11%. The Admin Center made up another 6%.
What is actually broken?
Users cannot reliably reach Teams chats, SharePoint sites, Excel files stored in the cloud, or the admin console. Microsoft has acknowledged the disruption but has not yet said what caused it.
"We're investigating reports of issues with Microsoft 365 services," the company said in a short statement, first flagged by BleepingComputer. IT administrators have been pointed to incident MO1437424 in the Microsoft 365 admin center for updates.
| Service | Share of complaints |
|---|---|
| SharePoint | 78% |
| Excel | 11% |
| Admin Center | 6% |
| Total reports at 11:11 a.m. ET | 2,403 |
| Downdetector baseline | 29 |
Is this a cyberattack?
There is no public evidence of a security incident at this stage. Microsoft has described it as a service issue and is investigating. Large 365 outages in the past have usually turned out to be configuration changes, networking faults or authentication problems inside Microsoft's own systems, not intrusions.
That is worth stating plainly, because when Teams and SharePoint go dark at the same time, the first question in most offices is whether someone broke in. So far, nothing suggests that.
What should users and IT teams do?
Wait, and watch the admin center. There is no user-side fix for a cloud outage of this kind. Restarting the Teams app or clearing a browser cache will not bring the servers back.
A few practical steps do help while services are down:
- Check the Microsoft 365 admin center for incident MO1437424 rather than relying on social media rumours.
- Fall back to phone, SMS or a secondary chat tool for anything urgent, and note which conversations will need to be re-sent once Teams returns.
- Avoid working on local copies of SharePoint or OneDrive files without checking sync status, to prevent version conflicts when the service comes back.
- Warn staff to be cautious of any email claiming to "restore" their Microsoft 365 access, as outages are a favourite backdrop for phishing, where criminals send fake login pages hoping panicked users will hand over passwords.
This is a developing story. Microsoft has not given a timeline for full recovery.
