Microsoft 365 Services Experience Widespread Outage

On January 22, 2026, Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook and Teams, experienced significant disruptions, impacting thousands of users across North America. Reports of issues began around 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time, with users encountering errors such as '451 4.3.2 temporary server issue' when attempting to send or receive emails.

Microsoft identified the cause as a portion of service infrastructure in North America not processing traffic as expected. The company stated, 'We're directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery.'

By approximately 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time, Microsoft reported that the affected infrastructure had been restored to a healthy state but noted that further load balancing was required to mitigate the outage's impact.

This incident follows a similar outage on January 21, 2026, which Microsoft attributed to a third-party networking issue.