Microsoft Restores 365 Services After Hours of Disruption - The National CIO Review

Microsoft confirmed late on January 22, 2026, that it had resolved an outage that brought down multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Defender, and other key administrative platforms. The incident began shortly after 2:00 p.m. ET, causing widespread disruption for enterprise and individual users. Microsoft attributed the service failure to a combination of “elevated service load” and “temporary capacity constraints” during a maintenance event, with additional impact stemming from a third-party networking issue in North America. Despite restoring infrastructure to a “healthy state” by 4:15 p.m., Microsoft acknowledged continued instability and spent several more hours rebalancing traffic and rerouting connections to mitigate lingering service problems. By early January 23, most services had returned to normal.