Reuters.com reported that “Microsoft said on Friday it has restored access to its suite of productivity software, while data from outage tracking website Downdetector.com showed that reports of outages had declined.” The January 23, 2026 article entitled ” Microsoft says access to productivity suite restored after outage” (https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-365-down-thousands-users-downdetector-shows-2026-01-22/) included these comments:
There were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET, down from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector.
The issue affected several Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview.
Microsoft 365 said in its status page on X that the affected infrastructure had been restored to a healthy state and the impact has been resolved.
The company had said earlier that it was routing traffic to alternate infrastructure to support recovery and was investigating an issue affecting multiple services after identifying a portion of its North America infrastructure that was not processing traffic as expected.
It will be interesting to learn caused this outage!
First published at https://www.vogelitlaw.com/blog/big-surprise-that-microsoft-had-a-major-outage