Microsoft is investigating a significant service disruption that impacted thousands of users across its Microsoft 365 suite on Jan. 22. The outage primarily affected core productivity tools, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Defender, and Microsoft Purview.
Reports of service issues began to surge around 1:15 p.m. EST, with more than 11,000 users logging disruptions on the tracking site DownDetector by 2:15 p.m. Some users on the Microsoft User Forum reported connectivity problems as early as 11:00 a.m.
“There is an unreported Microsoft Office 365/Exchange Online issue right now… Emails are going out slowly, nothing incoming,” one user shared on X.
Microsoft formally acknowledged the incident via its 365 Status account on X at 1:37 p.m., confirming an investigation into issues affecting security and compliance tools and standard office applications.
“We’re investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview. Further information can be found in the admin center under MO1221364,” the company shared on X.
Shortly after, at 2:17 p.m., Microsoft identified the source of the failure: “We’ve identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected. We’re working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery.”
By 2:53 p.m., the technology giant provided an update, noting that support staff were “continuing to review what actions are required to restore the affected infrastructure to a healthy state and rebalance the service traffic.”
For many users, the disruption manifested as an inability to send or receive emails, with some receiving a “451 4.3.2 temporary server issue” error message. By 4:14 p.m. EST, Microsoft indicated progress, stating it had “restored the affected infrastructure to a healthy state,” though it warned that “further load balancing is required to mitigate impact.”
This disruption follows a separate, brief outage reported on Jan. 21, which Microsoft attributed to a third-party networking issue. Engineers are currently working to rebalance traffic to alternate infrastructure to mitigate the ongoing impact on North American tenants.
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