Microsoft 365 Outage Disrupted Cloud Services, Blocked Email and File Access for Enterprise Users

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A major Microsoft 365 outage disrupted operations for numerous organizations, preventing users from accessing essential business tools. The outage, which began affecting users on January 22 around midday ET, has disrupted critical workflows by blocking access to email inboxes via Exchange Online, file searching within OneDrive and SharePoint Online, and collaboration features in Microsoft Teams. 

Enterprise customers were left unable to manage security dashboards in Microsoft Purview and Defender XDR.

Infrastructure Failure and Access Issues

Microsoft confirmed via its status page and social media channels that the issues stemmed from a portion of the service infrastructure in North America that was not processing traffic as intended. Consequently, this has led to widespread email and file access issues for administrators and end-users alike. 

Microsoft's status page said that the outage affected:

• Exchange Online, 
• SharePoint Online (file search function),
• OneDrive (file search function), 
• Teams (creating chats, meetings, or adding members in its video meeting platform),
• Microsoft Purview (admin access),
• Defender XDR (admin access).

At the moment of writing, the Microsoft status page lists all services as operational.

Microsoft Cloud Recovery Status

In response to the incident, Microsoft’s engineering teams have initiated recovery procedures. The tech giant stated that it was "working to restore the infrastructure to a healthy state to achieve recovery," though specific details about the technical failure remain sparse. 

Affected organizations are advised to monitor the official status page for real-time updates. While traffic processing is being rerouted and infrastructure rebooted, users may continue to experience intermittent connectivity and latency until full service stability is verified.

Microsoft confirmed last week that a recent Windows update may have blocked some users' access to Microsoft 365 Cloud PCs, a problem that has since been fixed. 

In other recent news, Okta SSO accounts were targeted in a vishing campaign claimed by ShinyHunters.

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