Microsoft 365 Outage: A 10-Hour Disruption Affecting Thousands
Microsoft 365 faced a major outage on January 22-23, 2026, disrupting services for thousands of users across North America for a span of nearly 10 hours. The disruption hit critical services such as Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Microsoft Defender. At the peak of the outage, approximately 16,000 users reported issues, as per Downdetector.
The issue was acknowledged by Microsoft at 7:37 PM UTC on Thursday. The company stated, “A portion of service infrastructure in North America is not processing traffic as expected.” Users reported a slow internal mail flow, while external email had come to a complete halt. The outage had a significant impact on businesses. A representative from a financial company expressed their concern, “We haven’t gotten emails since 1:30 pm and we run a financial company with clients!“
Microsoft worked tirelessly through the night to redirect traffic and restore infrastructure. The issue was officially declared resolved at approximately 1:30 AM Eastern on Friday, January 23. The company confirmed, “Mail flow is stable and access to affected services has been restored.” This incident marked Microsoft’s second significant outage in January 2026, following a brief disruption on January 21 due to third-party networking issues. The incident underscores the ongoing concerns about cloud service reliability as businesses increasingly depend on always-on digital infrastructure.
Source: The Register