Microsoft 365 Outlook down: Microsoft breaks silence on outage

Updated at 6:15 p.m. ET on Jan. 22: Microsoft shared a new update on its recovery efforts Thursday evening.

On the Microsoft 365 status page, the company wrote: "We're carefully rebalancing traffic across all affected infrastructure in the region, while monitoring the corresponding health telemetry, to ensure the environment enters into a balanced state as our remediation efforts continue. We’re proceeding as quickly as possible and this incremental approach will also help us identify whether any additional actions may be required to ensure longstanding recovery."

As of this writing, there is still an active alert for Microsoft 365: "Users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services."

Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, are experiencing heavy downtime today. Users have been reporting outages since the afternoon on social media and on Downdetector.

"Users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services," an update on Microsoft's status page reads.

Microsoft has now released a more detailed statement on the issue, letting users know that they are working on fixing the problem and acknowledging which services are facing outages.

"We're investigating a potential issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook, Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Purview," reads a Microsoft statement posted on X. 

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"We've identified a portion of service infrastructure in North America that is not processing traffic as expected," the company said in a follow-up statement. "We're working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery."

Microsoft's ongoing updates continued to detail that the company was working on mitigating the issues in order to restore the affected services.

"We're continuing to review what actions are required to restore the affected infrastructure to a healthy state and rebalance the service traffic to achieve recovery," Microsoft posted on the official @MSFT365Status X account.

Microsoft's final update seemed to suggest that the underlying issue was fixed, but problems stemming from the outage are currently persisting. 

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"While we've restored the affected infrastructure to a healthy state, further load balancing is required to mitigate impact," Microsoft said. "We're directing traffic to alternate infrastructure to achieve recovery."

Mashable will continue following the Microsoft 365 outage and provide more detailed updates on what happened as we find out.