Why does Microsoft still look green when Outlook is broken for us?

Tenant-scoped incidents and Message Center posts are not public. Office staff cannot see them. That is a known gap, not a failure of this checker.

If webmail or another site on the same WAN works, and only one app or one profile fails, it is almost never a global outage. If every user in every site fails at the same minute, start with the vendor page and Azure.

Outlook is disconnected but the website works. Is that an outage?

Almost never. That pattern is a profile, OST, add-in, or local network proxy. An outage takes out OWA as well.

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Outage status

Is Outlook down right now?

Outlook: Operational · checked just now

Source · status.cloud.microsoftNot an official vendor page

Operational

No active incident in the public RSS feed

Last checked just now (5 Oct, 08:55 UTC)

Official status page

Last ~2 hours (24 checks)

Outlook outage today: Exchange Online public status, known classic Outlook bugs, workarounds, and a them-or-you checklist.

1. Is it down right now?

Microsoft Admin Center public RSS. It is updated when admins cannot open Service health — not a full Outlook/Teams/SharePoint outage board. Check the official page and your admin centre.

Affected regions / cells: Classic Outlook bugs are often worldwide. Mail routing issues can be limited to one Microsoft forest or a sending IP range.

2. Known bug — is a fix date published?

No known bug with a published fix date right now.

No open incident in the last successful fetch.

3. Plain-English workaround

From experience

If Outlook says Disconnected: work in Outlook on the web first. That tells you whether Exchange Online is answering. Classic Outlook still carries a long list of client bugs (search, To-Do bar, shared calendars) that Microsoft publishes as known issues with workarounds — those are not outages. Create a new Outlook profile before you rebuild the PC.

4. Upstream or scheduled?

Vendors do not publish one shared dependency map. This list is the upstream tools we watch with this service.

Microsoft 365 OperationalOutlook desktop and OWA depend on Exchange Online and Entra sign-in.
Entra ID OperationalIf nobody can sign in, it is usually Entra, not the mailbox database.
Azure OperationalExchange Online runs on Azure.

Upcoming maintenance

No upcoming window in the vendor feed.

Outlook "Disconnected" is usually not Exchange being down

Start on Outlook on the web for the same mailbox. If OWA sends and receives, Exchange Online is answering and the desktop client is the patient. An outage that spares the website and punishes only classic Outlook is vanishingly rare. Official status lives at status.cloud.microsoft; tenant detail is in admin.microsoft.com.

What the status bar actually means

Connected to Microsoft Exchange. Transport is up. Search delays and shared-calendar ghosts are client or known-issue territory.
Trying to connect / Disconnected. Hold Ctrl, right-click the tray icon, open Connection Status. No rows means the client never found Exchange. Rows stuck on Disconnected means it found Exchange and then lost it — proxy, VPN, or a dead profile.
Need password on a Modern Auth prompt loop. Token or Conditional Access, not a mailbox database. See Entra ID.
Updating inbox for hours. Cached Exchange mode on a huge or corrupt OST, or a disk that is actually full.

End user vs admin

Users: private-window OWA, disable COM add-ins (Teams meeting and iCloud are weekly), then a new profile. Leave scanpst until the new profile works. Admins: Service health for Exchange, mailbox quota, litigation hold, and whether the user still has an Exchange licence. Classic Outlook has a public known-issue list — those are bugs with workarounds, not outages.

Related: Outlook disconnected guide.

Admin checks that actually change the ticket

In the admin centre: mailbox exists, Exchange licence present, not hidden from the GAL by accident, not over quota, not on a litigation hold that broke a third-party archive. In Entra: sign-in logs for AADSTS errors. On the PC: Connection Status rows, add-ins, new profile. Official public board stays status.cloud.microsoft.

Shared mailboxes and delegate calendars produce a special class of "Outlook is down" that is permissions or a known classic Outlook bug. If OWA shows the same mailbox correctly, stay on the client side.

Check your side

Does Outlook on the web load for the same mailbox?
Does the desktop client say Connected to Microsoft Exchange, Trying to connect, or Disconnected?
Safe mode / disable COM add-ins — a stale Teams meeting add-in is a weekly ticket.
New profile. Do not spend an hour on scanpst until you have tried this.
Is the mailbox over quota, or is Cached Exchange mode stuck on an old OST?

Related guides

FAQ

Is Outlook down right now?: We only repeat what Microsoft posts publicly. If this page is quiet, check the official status page and — if you are an admin — Service health in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. A single user on one PC is usually cache, profile, or network, not a worldwide outage.
Why does Microsoft still look green when Outlook is broken for us?: Tenant-scoped incidents and Message Center posts are not public. Office staff cannot see them. That is a known gap, not a failure of this checker.
Is it them or us?: If webmail or another site on the same WAN works, and only one app or one profile fails, it is almost never a global outage. If every user in every site fails at the same minute, start with the vendor page and Azure.
Outlook is disconnected but the website works. Is that an outage?: Almost never. That pattern is a profile, OST, add-in, or local network proxy. An outage takes out OWA as well.