Microsoft experienced one of the major outages in recent months, which nearly lasted for nearly nine hours and affected thousands of users across the globe on January 22.
As per Downdetector, a web outage tracking site, Outlook and Microsoft 365 reports peaked at tens of thousands of complaints at 11.40 a.m. PST / 2.40 p.m. EST / 7.40 p.m. GMT.
While some services were briefly restored at around 1.30 a.m. EST / 6.30 a.m. GMT / 10.30 p.m. PST, users continued to experience intermittent disruptions throughout the day.
The severe Microsoft outage disrupted access to major platforms including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, Azure and Microsoft Defender in different regions such as Europe, Asia, and other regions.
Due to the outage, users were unable to send emails, log into apps, or access security services.
Microsoft acknowledged the outage
As per Microsoft, the outage appeared to be caused by a service load elevation during maintenance of a North America server: "we’ve identified elevated service load combined with temporary capacity constraints during maintenance resulted in impact."
By early January 23, the American tech giant confirmed that the impact had been resolved, with service accessibility gradually returning to normal.
Downdetector also reported a sharp decline, and users steadily regained access to affected platforms.
Microsoft's outage has raised concerns regarding the reliability of large cloud service providers.
