January 22, 2026 — Microsoft Outlook users across the U.S. and other parts of the world reported widespread email access issues on Wednesday, as an outage affected parts of Microsoft’s cloud based services.
Many users said they were unable to send or receive emails, while others experienced problems signing in or loading inboxes. The disruption also appeared to affect some Microsoft 365 services connected to Outlook, raising concerns for businesses and remote workers who rely on the platform for daily communication.
What users experienced
Reports began surfacing earlier in the day as individuals and companies noticed delays, error messages, and repeated connection failures. Some users said Outlook would not refresh, while others were logged out unexpectedly.
The outage triggered a surge of complaints on social media and outage tracking sites, with users asking whether Outlook was down or if the issue was limited to certain regions.
Microsoft responds to the issue
Microsoft acknowledged the problem and said its engineers were investigating the cause. The company indicated that the issue was tied to backend service disruptions affecting Outlook and related Microsoft 365 components.
As troubleshooting continued, Microsoft said it was working to restore full service as quickly as possible. No immediate cause was publicly confirmed, and the company did not initially provide an estimated time for full recovery.
Impact on businesses and daily work
Outlook outages can have wide ripple effects, particularly for workplaces that depend on Microsoft 365 for email, calendars, and internal coordination. Some organizations reported delays in scheduled meetings and disruptions to normal business operations during the outage window.
While Microsoft Teams was not universally affected, some users reported limited access issues tied to the same service infrastructure.
Service restoration underway
By later in the day, some users began reporting gradual improvements, suggesting Microsoft’s fixes were starting to take effect. However, service stability varied by region, and not all users saw immediate resolution.
Microsoft advised users to monitor official service status updates as restoration efforts continued.
The outage serves as a reminder of how dependent modern communication has become on cloud services, and how quickly disruptions can impact both personal and professional routines when widely used platforms go offline.
