Microsoft says outage impacting thousands of 365 users is 'resolved'

An outage impacting Microsoft 365 users is "resolved" after thousands of users reported issues for several hours Thursday, Jan. 22. A few hundred are still reporting issues on Friday, Jan. 23.

Thousands of Microsoft 365 users began reporting outages on the afternoon of Jan. 22, according to Downdetector.

At the peak of the outage, more than 15,000 people reported Microsoft 365 outages at around 3:15 p.m. ET. But by 8 p.m. ET, those reports had subsided to about 2,000. As of Jan. 23 at 8 a.m. ET, reports were at around 600.

The majority of people (66%) reported issues with Microsoft Exchange, the tech giant's enterprise messaging and collaboration platform that provides business-class email, calendars, contacts and tasks.

Roughly 26% were having issues with the Microsoft 365 Administration Center, largely used by IT teams.

Microsoft says 'impact has been resolved'

At a little after midnight on Jan. 23, Microsoft shared on X that "we've restored access to the affected services and mail flow remains stable."

"While recovery efforts remain ongoing, we are methodically addressing the small number of remaining affected services to ensure full service stability," the post continued, directing users to Microsoft's service status page for more information.

By about 1:30 am, Microsoft wrote: "We've confirmed that impact has been resolved."

Some users were responding to the post on X saying they were still having trouble.

Microsoft addresses issues

Earlier in a post at 7 p.m. ET on Jan. 22, Microsoft said it was still working to fix the issues.

"We're continuing to refine our load balancing configurations to address residual imbalances across the environment," they said.

When issues first began to be reported, Microsoft acknowledged the problem and said that it was working to get services back up as soon as possible.

"We're investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview," Microsoft shared on an X account at 2:37 p.m. ET.

In a follow-up post at 3:17 p.m. ET, the account said, "We've identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected. We're working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery."

As of 4:14 p.m. ET, Microsoft said on X that it had "restored the affected infrastructure to a healthy state."

"We're directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery," it said.

USA TODAY contacted Microsoft about the reported outages on Jan. 22, but did not receive an immediate response.

This story has been updated to add new information.