Microsoft 365, Outlook Services Restored After Eight-Hour Outage

Microsoft 365 services, including critical platforms like Outlook and Teams, experienced a widespread and prolonged outage on Thursday, January 22, 2026, disrupting vital communication and productivity tools for thousands of users across North America and potentially beyond. The eight-hour disruption, initially stemming from an infrastructure issue and later complicated by an attempted fix, has now been resolved, with Microsoft confirming service restoration early Friday. This incident marks another significant interruption for a major tech service, highlighting the increasing fragility and complexity of global digital infrastructure.

Widespread Disruption and Initial Response

The outage began around 11:40 a.m. Pacific Time (3 p.m. Eastern Time) on Thursday, with reports quickly escalating across outage-tracking sites. Down Detector, a prominent platform for monitoring service interruptions, registered an immediate surge in complaints, peaking at over 16,000 reports for Microsoft 365 and nearly 7,000 for Outlook. Users reported widespread inability to log in, send or receive emails, access documents, or utilize other core applications within the Microsoft 365 suite. Specific services affected included Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Defender, Microsoft Purview, and certain components of Azure, indicating a broad impact across Microsoft’s enterprise offerings.

Microsoft was relatively swift in acknowledging the issue, posting on its official Microsoft 365 X (formerly Twitter) account that it was ‘investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.’ Further information was directed to the admin center, though many users and IT administrators found even this critical dashboard intermittently inaccessible due to the widespread nature of the outage. The company initially identified the root cause as ‘a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected,’ specifically citing issues impacting load balancing and service availability. This initial assessment pointed to a core network problem rather than an application-specific failure.

Adding to the concern, this incident followed a similar, albeit briefer, outage that had affected Microsoft 365 and Teams just the day before, on January 21. While Outlook was not impacted in the previous interruption, its central role in Thursday’s prolonged disruption underscored the severity of the new incident. The rapid accumulation of thousands of reports indicated that this was not an isolated problem but a significant systemic failure impacting a vast user base.

Challenges in Prolonged Recovery

The recovery process proved to be both challenging and protracted, extending for over eight hours. Microsoft’s efforts to mitigate the issue were complicated by an unexpected setback. At one point, the company disclosed that an ‘intended mitigation caused problems elsewhere in its infrastructure.’ A subsequent update on the official status page elaborated, stating that ‘a targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process… incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure.’ This admission suggested that Microsoft’s attempts to fix the original problem inadvertently worsened conditions in other areas, a common but frustrating occurrence in complex software and network recovery.

Throughout the outage, communication from Microsoft was provided through its X account and an official status page, though the latter was intermittently inaccessible due to ‘429 errors,’ indicating an overwhelming number of requests. This left many users and IT professionals struggling to get real-time updates, relying instead on social media and third-party tracking sites like Down Detector. User reports painted a picture of ongoing frustration; despite Microsoft’s claims of ‘positive signs of recovery’ as the day progressed, many continued to report complete inability to access emails or services. Comments flooded forums, with some users stating, ‘We are still 100% down,’ even hours into the disruption.

The impact varied across services and users. While some reported being able to log into the Microsoft 365 admin center, Outlook appeared to be particularly problematic, with users receiving ‘451 4.3.2 temporary server issue’ error messages when attempting to send or receive emails. Even as business hours concluded on the East Coast and throughout the Midwest, leading to a natural decline in active reports on Down Detector, many users on the West Coast and those working later hours continued to experience significant issues, suggesting that the reported decline wasn’t necessarily indicative of a full recovery for all.

Gradual Restoration and Official Resolution

As the outage stretched into late Thursday evening, Microsoft continued to issue updates, reporting ‘continued improvements in service availability and functionality’ as a result of intensified ‘load-balancing efforts.’ The company’s engineers focused on ‘refining load balancing efforts to optimize performance and reduce potential impact,’ while also ‘directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery.’ These technical adjustments aimed to rebalance the traffic across all affected infrastructure, moving towards a stable and functional state. Microsoft, however, refrained from providing an estimated time of arrival (ETA) for full service restoration, indicating the complexity and uncertainty of the situation.

Signs of recovery were initially observed in mail delivery, with Microsoft noting ‘positive signs’ in that area, even while acknowledging that some connectivity impact remained between Microsoft Defender for Office, Microsoft Purview, and Exchange Online, along with DNS lookup failures. The company assured users that engineers were ‘actively working to restore full functionality.’

Finally, early Friday morning, Microsoft officially confirmed the resolution of the widespread outage. As reported by CBS News, a statement on social media declared, ‘We’ve confirmed that impact has been resolved,’ bringing an end to the prolonged disruption that had affected thousands. This incident follows a similar, albeit shorter, outage on January 21, and a more significant global disruption in 2024 caused by a botched CrowdStrike antivirus software update, which notably affected flights, hospitals, and banks worldwide. The recurrence of such events underscores the growing concern over the resilience of critical digital services.

The recurrence of significant outages affecting critical services like Microsoft 365 underscores the increasing reliance of global businesses and individuals on cloud infrastructure, and the cascading impact when these foundational systems falter. While major tech companies invest heavily in redundancy, these incidents highlight the persistent challenge of maintaining uninterrupted service at scale, particularly when complex infrastructure changes are implemented, and the critical need for robust disaster recovery and communication strategies.