Problems can come uninvited, and the Microsoft authentication issue is a case in point. It recently hit several key services of the company like Office 365, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Skype, XBox Live, Microsoft Azure, etc. The services either stopped responding to users request or simply directed users to a blank page, displaying an error message that their account does not exist.

After some delay, the services were restored. What was worth noticing about the services outage was whether the problem was region specific or widespread. For instance, Outlook, the email service was down across Europe and the northeastern United States. XboxLive services also appeared to have been affected in the same regions. Skype, hit in Japan and the US east coast. This, obviously brings our focus to one main question – is there any way to find out if Microsoft services are down or not? Certainly, there is!

You can check or Get Operation Status activity to determine whether the operation requested by that activity has succeeded, failed, or is still in progress.

Check operation status of Microsoft Services

Is Outlook.com, Skype, OneDrive or Xbox Live down? Is there an Azure or Office 365 outage? Check the operation status of Microsoft Services using these links. The Get Operation Status activity is used to get the status of the specified operation (Azure, Office 365, Outlook.com, OneDrive, Skype, XBox Live, etc.).

1] Check Azure status

You can get Operation Status of the Azure by visiting its Status page. It presents a region wise report (America, Europe, and Asia Pacific) and displays the status as shown in the screenshot below.

1. Good
2. Warning
3. Error
4. Information.

For targeted notifications regarding the health of Azure resources and customization of notifications, users can visit the Azure portal.

2] Check Office 365, Skype, OneDrive status

Office 365 contains online and offline versions of Microsoft Office, Skype for Business (previously: Lync) and OneDrive, as well as online versions of Sharepoint, Exchange, and Project. You can check or verify the Office 365 service health status by visiting here.

There, you can check the Office 365 service health status by entering your Microsoft credentials. The page offers information for a default of the last seven days.

3] Is Xbox Live down

Xbox Live is an online multiplayer gaming and digital media delivery platform, available on the Xbox 360 gaming console, Windows PCs and Windows Phone devices. If you are experiencing trouble booting up your digital games and logging into Xbox Live, you can check the online gaming infrastructure by visiting its status page. There you can check the status for services, websites, games and apps listed under Xbox Live Status.

4] Is Outlook.com down

Similarly, the Outlook.com status dashboard indicates whether the service is down for users or not, specifically, those using Windows Mail, Outlook Connector, MSN Premium client Windows Phone and the Windows Mail Client. To check this, visit its portal Service Staus page. Here, you can check the status of the services that are up and running.

Would you like to share your experiences about the recent Microsoft services outage. Or wish to give feedback? Please do so in the comments section below.