Microsoft outage takes down Xbox Live, Teams, Office 365, OneDrive, and Bing [Updated]

Laptop with Office 365
Laptop with Office 365 (Image credit: Windows Central)

What you need to know

  • Several Microsoft services, including Teams, Azure, Office 365, and even Bing, are down right now.
  • Reports of outages began spiking around 5 p.m. ET.
  • The outage seems to be the U.S. only for now and could be related to a Cloudflare DNS outage

Update April 2, 2021 at 9:15 am ET: Microsoft confirmed that the issues are resolved and all services have "returned to a healthy state."

Update April 1, 2021 at 6:35 pm ET: Microsoft is "seeing improvement in service availability." as it has "rerouted traffic to our resilient DNS capabilities." The next status update is due in 60 minutes or so. We can confirm Bing, OneDrive, and Skype are now working again.

It appears several Microsoft services are down for the count this afternoon. Microsoft Teams, Office 365, Xbox Live, OneDrive, Azure, Skype, and even Bing are down right now. The cause for the outage isn't clear, though Microsoft noted that there is an issue affecting the Azure Portal and Azure services.

According to outage-tracking site DownDetector, reports of outages across Microsoft services began flooding in around 5 p.m. ET. Thousands of reports have been noted for Xbox Live, Teams, and Office. We noticed the outage, oddly enough, when attempting to access Bing and being met with an error page.

Some reports suggest that it is only affecting users in the U.S. It could also be related to a similar outage with Cloudflare, which handles DNS.

See more

This is the second major outage across Microsoft services in recent weeks. On March 15, Azure suffered some downtime, taking out Xbox services, Teams, and Office 365 late in the day.

We'll continue to update this post as more information becomes available from Microsoft. For now, it looks like you may run into a snag or two if you planned on taking any Teams calls, jumping into one of the best Xbox games on your Xbox Series X, or simply wanted to Bing something (if that's your thing).

Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the former Editor-in-Chief of Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central, Android Central, and iMore as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl