Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupts Outlook, Defender, and More
On January 22, 2026, Microsoft 365 experienced a significant outage, affecting numerous services including Outlook, Microsoft Defender, and Teams. The disruption began around 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time, with users reporting issues such as delayed emails, inability to access services, and degraded functionality.
Microsoft identified the root cause as a portion of its service infrastructure in North America failing to process traffic as expected. This led to widespread service interruptions across various Microsoft 365 applications. The company promptly acknowledged the issue and initiated remediation efforts to restore normal operations.
The outage impacted several key services:
– Outlook and Exchange Online: Users encountered errors when sending or receiving emails, often receiving a 451 4.3.2 temporary server issue message.
– Microsoft Teams: Difficulties included creating chats, meetings, teams, channels, and adding members. Some users were unable to create breakout rooms or live events.
– SharePoint Online and OneDrive: Users faced challenges searching within these platforms.
– Microsoft Defender and Purview: Access to service portals was restricted, hindering security management and compliance monitoring.
Microsoft’s engineering teams worked diligently to restore the affected infrastructure to a healthy state. While initial recovery efforts were successful, further load balancing was required to fully mitigate the impact. The company implemented additional actions to direct traffic to healthy sections of the infrastructure, aiming to achieve complete recovery.
This incident underscores the critical reliance on cloud-based services in modern business operations. Organizations are reminded of the importance of having contingency plans and alternative communication channels to maintain productivity during such disruptions.
As of the latest updates, Microsoft continues to monitor the situation and is committed to providing timely information to its users. Users are encouraged to check the Microsoft 365 status page for the most current information regarding service availability.
