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Microsoft email outage update: Are Outlook, Teams, Azure back up? Positive news amid downtime
Microsoft, in the latest update on its status page, said it has made progress restoring services after a widespread Microsoft 365 disruption
Microsoft, in the latest update on its status page, said it has made progress restoring services after a widespread Microsoft 365 disruption that left users across North America struggling to access key tools, including Outlook and Teams.
According to the company’s latest update, the affected infrastructure has now been brought back to a healthy state. However, Microsoft acknowledged that additional load balancing is still underway to fully stabilize the platform and prevent intermittent issues from persisting.
“Current status: While we've restored the affected infrastructure to a heathy state, further load balancing is required to mitigate persistent impact. We've identified and are implementing additional actions to direct requests and traffic to additional healthy sections of infrastructure to achieve withstanding recovery,” Microsoft noted.
Microsoft outage update
During the outage, users encountered degraded functionality or complete access failures across multiple Microsoft 365 services. Many reported receiving a “451 4.3.2 temporary server issue” error while trying to send or receive emails through Outlook. Problems were also reported with Exchange Online email delivery, delayed or failed message traces, and sluggish or incomplete searches within SharePoint Online and OneDrive.
The disruption extended beyond email. Users faced difficulties accessing service portals such as Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, and the Microsoft 365 admin center. In Microsoft Teams, some were unable to create chats, meetings, teams or channels, add members, or view presence and location information. Microsoft Fabric users also experienced issues managing sensitivity labels and interacting with labeled reports and artifacts.
Microsoft attributed the outage to a portion of dependent service infrastructure in North America that was not processing traffic as expected. The company said it is now directing requests to additional healthy infrastructure segments to achieve sustained recovery.
While most core systems are coming back online, Microsoft warned that users in impacted regions may continue to see intermittent issues as mitigation work continues. The next official status update is expected by Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 11:00 PM UTC.
