Starting at approximately 08:30 GMT on January 22, 2026, Microsoft 365 services began experiencing a significant global degradation. Users across Europe, North America, and Asia have reported total inability to access Outlook emails, Teams meetings, and OneDrive files.
What We Know So Far
The outage appears to be centered around Microsoft's Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) authentication layer. While the servers themselves may be functional, the "gatekeeper" service that validates user logins is failing, resulting in "503 Service Unavailable" or "Request Timeout" errors for both web and desktop clients.
Live Status (14:00 GMT):
- ❌ Outlook: Web and Mobile clients failing.
- ❌ Microsoft Teams: Users unable to join calls or send messages.
- ⚠️ OneDrive: Read-only access for some users; upload failing.
- ✅ Azure Core: Most compute and storage services remain stable.
Microsoft's Official Response
Via the @MSFT365Status handle on X, Microsoft confirmed they are "investigating an issue where users may be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services." Preliminary reports suggest a network configuration change within the Wide Area Network (WAN) may be the culprit, echoing similar outages from previous years.
"We have identified a potential networking issue and are rolling back a recent update to our internal traffic routing protocols," Microsoft stated in a recent update to the admin center.
The Cost of Downtime
With over 400 million paid seats, even a few hours of Microsoft 365 downtime carries a multi-billion dollar impact on global productivity. Remote-first companies are particularly hard hit, as Teams serves as their primary "office" infrastructure.
Many businesses have reported switching to alternative communication tools like Slack and Discord to maintain operations while waiting for a resolution.
Timeline of Events (GMT)
- 08:30: Initial reports of login failures in Northern Europe.
- 09:15: Outage spreads to the East Coast of North America as the workday begins.
- 10:00: Microsoft officially acknowledges the issue on the Service Health Dashboard.
- 11:30: First mention of "traffic routing issues" and beginning of rollback.
- 13:45: Some users report intermittent access, but core services remain unstable.
Conclusion
This outage serves as a stark reminder of the "SaaS Fragility" in 2026. As companies move more of their core infrastructure into a single cloud provider's ecosystem, a single point of failure—like an authentication handshake—can halt global commerce.
We will continue to update this post as more information regarding the root cause and final restoration becomes available.