Yesterday (January 22, 2026), Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365) experienced a significant outage affecting many users, particularly business and enterprise customers.
The issues began spiking around mid-afternoon Eastern Time (roughly 2:30–3:00 PM ET), with thousands of reports on sites like Downdetector peaking at over 15,000 complaints. Affected services primarily included:
- Outlook/Exchange Online — Problems sending/receiving emails, delays, or complete inability to access.
- Microsoft Teams — Degraded or disrupted functionality.
- Microsoft 365 admin center and related portals (e.g., Defender, Purview) — Timeouts, loading failures, or error messages like HTTP 500/502.
- Other connected components in the Microsoft 365 suite.
Microsoft officially acknowledged the problem via their @MSFT365Status account and service health dashboard, describing it as a service disruption impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services (especially business/enterprise tenants in North America). The root cause appeared to involve infrastructure struggling to handle or properly manage incoming traffic, leading to degraded performance and rebalancing efforts across affected systems.
Consumer-grade Microsoft services (like personal Outlook.com or basic apps) were largely unaffected or saw minimal impact.
The outage lasted several hours into the evening, with reports gradually declining. By late January 22 and into early January 23, Microsoft confirmed the issue was resolved, with services restored and stable after monitoring. They rebalanced traffic and remediated the infrastructure problems.
If you’re still seeing any lingering issues today, check the official Microsoft 365 service health status page (status.cloud.microsoft or via the admin center) for your specific tenant, as some isolated/residual effects can vary by account type or region.
Most sources indicate everything is back to normal now.