BREAKING
TECH / OUTAGE
MICROSOFT 365
Outlook and Teams outage: thousands report Microsoft 365 disruptions in North America
Users reported trouble accessing Microsoft 365 services including Outlook and Teams on Thursday, one day after a separate short disruption.
Microsoft said it restored affected infrastructure to a healthy state, and continued rebalancing traffic to stabilize services (incident reference: MO1221364).
What happened
On Thursday, January 22, 2026, thousands of users reported problems across Microsoft 365 services.
Reports spiked in the afternoon (ET), with Outlook email and Microsoft Teams among the most commonly affected apps.
What users experienced
- Outlook users reported issues signing in, sending, or receiving emails.
- Some Teams users reported trouble joining meetings or loading messages.
- DownDetector saw thousands of reports during the peak window, then a steady decline as mitigation progressed.
Microsoft indicated the disruption was tied to a portion of service infrastructure in North America that was not processing traffic as expected,
and that engineers were working on restoration and traffic rebalancing.
Microsoft’s response and where to check status
Microsoft acknowledged the incident publicly and said teams were investigating. The company later reported that the impacted infrastructure
had been restored to a healthy state, while additional load balancing and traffic re-routing continued to reduce the impact.
- Open Microsoft’s service health portal: status.cloud.microsoft
- If you are a tenant admin, check the Microsoft 365 admin center for the incident reference: MO1221364
- Try logging in via a different network (mobile hotspot vs Wi-Fi) to rule out local connectivity issues.
- If Outlook desktop is affected, try Outlook on the web (OWA) as a temporary workaround.
Outage timeline (ET)
What you can do right now
- Do not panic-reset everything: widespread outages are rarely solved by repeated password resets.
- Use alternatives: switch to Outlook on the web, mobile apps, or temporary email routing if your business has backup tools.
- Check service health: confirm the incident status on Microsoft’s portal and your tenant admin center.
- Communicate internally: if your organization relies on Teams meetings, post updates via SMS/WhatsApp groups temporarily.
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