Microsoft 365 Services Experience Widespread Outage, Impacting Outlook and More
Microsoft is currently addressing a significant disruption affecting multiple Business and Enterprise Microsoft 365 services, including the widely used Outlook email platform. The incident, which began around 2:00 p.m. ET on January 22, 2026, has left users experiencing degraded functionality or complete inability to access key applications.
According to a company release, Microsoft has partially resolved the underlying issue, but full restoration is ongoing. The disruption stems from problems with backend infrastructure in the North America region, where “a portion of dependent service infrastructure isn’t processing traffic as expected.”
The company stated that the affected infrastructure has been restored to a healthy state, but further work is needed. “While we’ve restored the affected infrastructure to a heathy state, further load balancing is required to mitigate persistent impact,” a senior official stated. “We’ve identified and are implementing additional actions to direct requests and traffic to additional healthy sections of infrastructure to achieve withstanding recovery.”
Initially, the outage impacted a broad range of features, including:
- Sending and receiving email through Exchange Online, including notifications from Microsoft Viva Engage.
- Collecting message traces.
- Searching within SharePoint Online and/or Microsoft OneDrive.
- Accessing service portals like Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, and the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Creating chats, meetings, teams, channels, or adding members in Microsoft Teams.
- Receiving presence or location information in Microsoft Teams.
- Applying and managing sensitivity labels, and interactive operations within Microsoft Fabric.
Microsoft is actively communicating updates through its status page – which itself is reportedly experiencing reliability issues – and via posts on X (formerly Twitter). The company anticipates publishing its next status update at 6:00 p.m. ET.
One recent post on X stated: “While we’ve restored the affected infrastructure to a heathy state, further load balancing is required to mitigate impact. We’re directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery. More information can be found at https://t.co/uFnnN6T3jN or under MO1221364 if…”
The situation remains fluid, and time.news will continue to monitor developments and provide updates as they become available.
