Nice. Status.live.com is down. Skydrive is down. Some people in Redmond are getting early morning phone calls I’m guessing. #Office365 — Nicholas Romyn (@nickromyn) February 1, 2013

Well this is no way to start your Friday, there are widespread reports on twitter this morning of several Microsoft services being unavailable. In addition to the Office disruption, users are reporting issues accessing Outlook.com and Skydrive as well.

Our attempts to access Skydrive and Outlook.com are met with 504 Gateway timeouts with the following error being reported, "Gateway timeout expired while waiting for server response".

Office 365 is down apparently. Can't send any email or access any of the online stuff. Just times out. — Erlingur (@erlingur) February 1, 2013

For many, this will not be a great start to the weekend and we can imagine that the folks in Redmond are waking up to many unhappy customers. An outage such as this comes at a critical time when Microsoft is working to build its image that it is able to keep its cloud online at all times. We have seen other platforms, such as Amazons cloud service EC2, report outages in the recent past as well.

Some users are having issues accessing SkyDrive as well and the service was down briefly for us around 10:00AM EST. We should note that we have been able to access SkyDrive starting around 10:15AM EST but navigation and login times took a considerable amount of time to complete.

[Update] At 10:45AM EST, users are starting to report that some of the services are coming back online.

We have pinged Microsoft to see if they have any information about when the service will be restored.