Microsoft 365? More like Microsoft 404

Microsoft 365 is one of Microsoft's flagship products, reaching millions of enterprise customers and consumers around the globe. As I have been saying for the past few years, it's my favorite Redmond product, even if it is getting fairly expensive. That said, there seems to have been a bit of a noticeable decline on the service side recently, with Microsoft 365 experiencing frequent outages in the past few months.

We reported a Microsoft 365 outage on October 9, affecting the Office.com portal and related services. It took the tech giant only about an hour to fix it, because it was simply a case of misconfiguration on the network infrastructure for North America, but the impact was fairly significant.

Just prior to this, Microsoft 365 experienced downtime on October 8, too, affecting those leveraging Entra to sign in to Office services through multi-factor authentication (MFA). Redmond was able to patch this particular problem in roughly four hours as well, but it was yet again a nuisance for customers, especially those on the enterprise side.

To me, the recent outages have just highlighted the growing inconsistency in the quality of Microsoft 365 services in the past year. The two instances highlighted above aren't isolated incidents; there has been a trend of outages in 2025. While there seems to be no definitive public dashboard to track the operational status of Microsoft 365 services this year and compare it against previous years, I went through Neowin's "Published News" section available to staff to find out how many times we reported on Microsoft 365 outages, as an indicator of overall quality.

Looking through that section, I realized that there were at least 11 outages in 2025, starting from March 2 and going up until October 9. That's 11 outages spread across seven months, averaging more than one outage a month. That's a lot.

I compared that with our data from 2024 and discovered that we only reported on five outages across the whole year. That's less than half the outages reported today, and there are still over two months to go until 2025 ends. Now, I'm not saying that our news coverage is the definitive way to chart the trend for Microsoft 365 outages, but since we do report on the operational status of the service frequently, it's definitely a good indicator.

Credit where credit is due, though; Microsoft treats Microsoft 365 outages as high-priority incidents and manages to resolve them in a matter of a few hours usually. This is critical because downtime for these cloud services impacts businesses directly, resulting in disruptions to business continuity and lost revenue overall.

However, it's clear that there has been a downward trend in the operational quality of Microsoft 365 this year, which is unfortunate considering that it is a pretty decent package overall that is highly used in both enterprise environments and personal scenarios.

When a service is as widely used as Microsoft 365 is, there is a higher expectation for the standard of quality, too. I went through Microsoft's service level agreements (SLAs) for online services, and as expected, the Redmond tech giant commits to 99.9% of uptime across most of its core technologies, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365 apps, Office Online, and more.

I highly doubt that the outages this year have caused the uptime number to dip below 99.9% since most issues are patched fairly quickly, but perhaps the company should also begin tracking and incorporating the frequency of downtime instances in its SLAs. A long downtime is a big issue, but so are frequent, smaller downtimes. It's clear that this is something that Microsoft needs to improve upon going into 2026.

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Posted Saturday 11 October 2025 at 3:15 pm AEST (my time).

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