The following was found on Microsoft's status page.
Issue ID: MO1221364
User Impact: Users may be seeing degraded service functionality or be unable to access multiple Microsoft 365 services
More info: Some of the impacted service functions include, but may not be limited to:
- Sending and receiving email through Exchange Online, including notification email from Microsoft Viva Engage as well as subscription email for Microsoft Fabric users. Users may be receiving a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email through Outlook.
- Collecting message traces.
- Searching within SharePoint Online and/or Microsoft OneDrive.
- Accessing the service portals, including Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, and the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Creating chats, meetings, teams, channels or adding members in Microsoft Teams. Additionally, some users may be unable to create breakout rooms
- Receiving presence or location information in Microsoft Teams.
- Existing or new meeting options for Facilitator in Teams may not be honored.
- Applying and managing sensitivity labels, interactive operations on reports, and artifacts with sensitivity labels in Microsoft Fabric.
- Print registration and printer jobs may fail in Universal Print.
- Microsoft To Do users may have experienced synchronization issues, preventing tasks from updating across devices. Additionally, tasks created in Shared Lists may not have appeared for collaborators.
- Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps users may not have been able to view insights or view, create, or update OAuth enabled app policies. Reporting data may have also appeared blank, even though no errors were shown.
- Microsoft Defender for Office (MDO) users may have experienced limited access to administrative and SOC experiences, including the quarantine portal and Safe Links protection.
- Microsoft Power Automate users may have been unable to utilize Power Automate connectors including Office 365, Office 365 Users, Office 365 Groups, and Office 365 Groups Mail.
Scope of impact: Any users served through an affected section of service infrastructure in the North America region may have been intermittently impacted. This could have affected users located in Asia-Pacific, Europe, or Latin America.
Preliminary Root cause: We identified that the issue was caused by elevated service load resulting from reduced capacity during maintenance for a subset of North America hosted infrastructure.
Next Steps:
- We’re actively reviewing service load activity and thresholds to ensure consistent accessibility while improving overall service stability.
- We're reviewing our incident response handling to identify areas for improvement that will help reduce our time to resolution for future events.
We'll provide a preliminary Post-Incident Report within two business days and a final Post-Incident Report within five business days.
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Jan 23, 2026, 1:27 AM EST We’ve confirmed that the affected infrastructure has returned to a healthy state and is operating as expected. We’ll continue to closely monitor the remediation actions taken and make any necessary adjustments to maintain stability. If users experience any residual issues, clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values may help ensure a quicker remediation.
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Jan 23, 2026, 1:00 AM EST We’ve confirmed that service restoration is complete. If users continue to see residual issues, clearing local DNS caches or temporarily lowering DNS TTL values can help ensure updates are reflected more quickly.
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Jan 23, 2026, 12:31 AM EST We’ve a high level of confidence that the incident is largely resolved. Access to Microsoft Defender for Office, Microsoft Purview, and DNS functionality has been restored, and Exchange Online mail flow remains stable. We're continuing to fine tune load balancing adjustments and closely monitor the impact of recent changes to support sustained recovery. While recovery efforts remain ongoing, we are methodically addressing the small number of remaining affected services to ensure full service stability
Previous status: We're continuing to refine our load balancing configurations to remedy residual imbalances across the environment and further our ongoing recovery efforts.
Next update by: Friday, January 23, 2026, at 1:30 AM UTC
Previous status: During our ongoing efforts to rebalance traffic across the region, we introduced a targeted load balancing configuration change intended to expedite the recovery process, which incidentally introduced additional traffic imbalances associated with persistent impact for a portion of the affected infrastructure. We're remedying our load balancing configurations while, in parallel, reviewing the viability of expediting our ongoing incremental rebalancing and recovery efforts. Scope of impact: Any users served through an affected section of service infrastructure in the North America region may be intermittently impacted.
Next update by: Friday, January 23, 2026, at 12:00 AM UTC
Previous status: 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.
Next update by: Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 11:30 PM UTC
More info: Users may be receiving a "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue" error message when attempting to send or receive email through Outlook.
Some of the impacted service functions include, but may not be limited to:
- Sending and receiving email through Exchange Online, including notification emails from Microsoft Viva Engage.
- Collecting message traces.
- Searching within SharePoint Online and/or Microsoft OneDrive.
- Accessing the service portals, including Microsoft Purview, Microsoft Defender XDR, and the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Creating chats, meetings, teams, channels or adding members in Microsoft Teams.
- Receiving presence or location information in Microsoft Teams.
- Applying and managing sensitivity labels, interactive operations on reports, and artifacts with sensitivity labels in Microsoft Fabric.
Previous 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.
Next update by: Thursday, January 22, 2026, at 11:00 PM UTC
Carlos Rios
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