Microsoft acknowledged the outage at 11:37 a.m. Pacific Thursday, posting to X that it is ‘investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.’
Microsoft is working to correct issues affecting access to Outlook, Defender, Purview and other services in North America.
The Redmond, Wash.-based technology giant acknowledged the outage at 11:37 a.m. Pacific Thursday, posting to X that it is “investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services.”
At 12:17 p.m., the vendor said it “identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected.” At 1:14 p.m., Microsoft said it has “restored the affected infrastructure to a (healthy) state” but “further load balancing is required to mitigate impact.”
“We’re directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery,” the vendor said.
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Microsoft Outage
CRN has reached out to Microsoft for comment.
Downdetector logged 12,380 reports of an outage in Microsoft’s Outlook email service as of 12:15 p.m. Thursday; 15,745 reports of an outage in the Microsoft 365 suite of cloud applications as of 12:17 p.m.; and 2,246 reports for the Microsoft Store as of 12:29 p.m.
Downdetector also showed 598 reports of an outage with Microsoft’s Teams communications application and 395 reports of an outage with the Azure cloud service as of 12:15 p.m. Pacific–although because the website uses user submitted information, it’s possible the users didn’t know which Microsoft product actually went down.
Microsoft’s status page for a variety of its products and services showed no Azure issues
The status page did show that Outlook users might receive a “451 4.3.2 temporary server issue” error message when attempting to send or receive email. Users might not have the ability to send and receive email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage, according to the vendor.
Users might also see delays and failures of collecting message traces and searching within SharePoint Online and Microsoft OneDrive. Users also might not have the ability to access Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, the Microsoft 365 administrator center and other service portals.
David Stinner, president of US itek, a Buffalo, N.Y.-based MSP, said Outlook email has been down for his company and his customers for the last several hours as a result of the outage.
Stinner said he has sent a message to all of his customers informing them of the outage through ITControlPanel, an Invarosoft product that he uses to communicate with customers.
“We sent a message to all of our customers through ITControlPanel early on in the outage so our help desk phone didn’t blow up with everyone calling at the same time,” he said. “Being ahead of the curve by communicating with our customers has taken away the stress for both US itek and our customers,” he said. “We are communicating proactively with customers through ITControlPanel and it has taken away the stress for both US itek and our customers. The important thing is customers aren’t in the dark with no communication from their MSP. All our customers really want is to know what’s going on and for us to keep them updated. The unknown is the bigger problem.”
Stinner said he expects Microsoft to have the issue resolved in several hours. “The outage has impacted our customers but it is not nearly as stressful as when we managed Exchange servers on our own,” he said.
This is not Microsoft’s first outage of 2026, with the vendor handling access issues with Teams, Outlook and other M365 services on Wednesday.
Microsoft posted to X about that outage at 9:11 a.m. Pacific Wednesday and called the issues “resolved” at 10:29 a.m. Pacific. The vendor blamed the incident on a third-party network issue after determining that the Microsoft service environment was healthy.
On Jan. 15, the vendor experienced issues with its Microsoft Copilot artificial intelligence application in North America. Microsoft acknowledged the issue at 7:42 p.m. Pacific and called it “resolved” at 8:24 p.m. The vendor blamed the issue on a configuration change to the service and reverted the change to resolve impact.
Other major outages already experienced so far in the first weeks of 2026 include Verizon’s nearly 10-hour one earlier in the month, which hit more than 1 million users across the U.S.
