Is SharePoint Down? How to Check the Status

How do you tell a real outage from a problem at your end?

Most SharePoint failures are local, so spend two minutes ruling that out before you report anything. Each of these checks removes one possible cause.

1. Open any other website. If nothing loads, the problem is your connection.
2. Open another Microsoft 365 service, such as your mailbox. If that works, the problem is narrower than a whole outage.
3. Open SharePoint in a private or incognito window, which ignores your cached sign-in and most extensions.
4. Try a different browser, then a different device.
5. Switch network: from office wi-fi to a phone hotspot, or the other way round.
6. Ask one colleague to open the same site. If it works for them, this is about your account or your device, not the service.

If the site fails for several people on different networks, treat it as an incident and stop testing.

Where is the official SharePoint status published?

There are three places, and they answer different questions.

• Service health inside the Microsoft 365 admin center is the authoritative one, because it is specific to your organisation's tenant. Only administrators can see it.
• Microsoft's public status page covers wide incidents affecting many customers. A problem confined to one tenant will not appear there.
• Your own IT team's channel, whether that is a helpdesk portal, an internal chat channel or a status board, is usually the fastest human answer.

Third-party outage trackers that count user reports are worth a glance, but they lag and they cannot distinguish your tenant from anyone else's. Use them as a hint, not as evidence.

What can you check if you are not an administrator?

You cannot see service health, but you are not without options. Ask in your team channel first, because someone has usually already asked. Then check whether the failure is site-wide or file-specific by opening a different SharePoint site you have access to. If one site fails and another loads, the service is up and something about that site has changed.

Write down the exact time, the exact error text and the address of the page you were on. That is what your helpdesk needs, and it is what you will forget within an hour.

What do the common SharePoint errors mean?

• Access denied, or error 403, means you are signed in but not permitted. Permissions changed, or you are signed in as the wrong account.
• Not found, or error 404, means the page or file is not where the link points. It may have been moved, renamed or deleted.
• Sorry, something went wrong is SharePoint's general failure message, and it is usually accompanied by a correlation ID.
• Too many requests, or error 429, means throttling: the service is deliberately slowing your account or your tenant because of heavy automated activity.
• A sign-in loop that never completes usually points to conditional access rules, an expired session or a device compliance policy rather than an outage.
• A blank page that never finishes loading often means a browser extension or a corporate proxy is blocking part of the page.

What is a correlation ID and why should you copy it?

A correlation ID is a long code shown with a SharePoint error. It identifies your specific failed request in Microsoft's logs. On its own it means nothing to you, but with it and the exact time, an administrator or Microsoft support can find what actually happened instead of guessing.

Copy it as text if you can, and take a screenshot as well. Reporting an error without it usually results in being asked to reproduce the problem later, when it may have gone away.

Why is SharePoint down for you but fine for everyone else?

Individual failures are more common than tenant-wide ones, and they have ordinary causes.

• Your permission to the site was removed, or the site owner changed a group you were in.
• Your licence changed or lapsed.
• You are signed in with a personal account in one browser profile and a work account in another.
• A conditional access policy blocks the device, the location or the network you are using.
• The site was moved to a new address, and your bookmark still points at the old one.
• A retention or archiving policy has taken the content out of the live site.

What should you do while SharePoint is unavailable?

Stop retrying in a loop. Repeated automatic retries are one of the things that trigger throttling, which turns a short problem into a longer one.

1. Work from the locally synced copy if you use the sync client, and let it upload when the service returns.
2. Do not save new versions repeatedly against a failing site; save locally under a clear name and reconcile afterwards.
3. Note the time you stopped being able to work, because that is what your organisation will need for its own record.
4. Watch the incident update rather than the site itself, and reload only when the status changes.
5. When it comes back, check that the last edit you made before the failure actually saved before you continue on top of it.

What should you tell your helpdesk?

A useful report fits in a few lines: the address of the page, the exact error text, the correlation ID, the time and time zone, whether it fails in a private window, whether it fails on another device or network, and whether a colleague sees the same thing. Sending that in the first message saves a full round trip, and it is the difference between a fix today and a fix tomorrow.