Jake Peterson

Jake Peterson Senior Technology Editor

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Jake Peterson is Lifehacker’s Tech Editor, and has been covering tech news and how-tos for nearly a decade. His team covers all things technology, including AI, smartphones, computers, game consoles, and subscriptions.

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January 21, 2026 Add as a preferred source on Google

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Credit: aileenchik/Shutterstock

Key Takeaways

1. Microsoft is currently experiencing an outage with its services.
2. Users are reporting issues with Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Outlook.
3. If your apps are impacted, you’ll need to wait for Microsoft to issue a patch.

Table of Contents

Heads up, workers of the world: Microsoft 365 is currently down. Microsoft’s flagship work suite, which includes tools like Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook, is currently experiencing issues impacting users. It’s not yet clear exactly why these problems are occurring, but according to Downdetector (owned by Lifehacker parent company Ziff Davis) thousands of users are reporting issues.

There are any number of causes that could trigger a widespread outage like this, and in all likelihood, Microsoft will have the issue isolated and fixed soon—especially considering how many companies and users rely on Microsoft 365 to function. But it does follow a number of high-profile outages this week. Just this morning, Yahoo! and AOL were both down. Last week, X experienced an outage, as did Verizon—quite famously, I might add.

What do you think so far?

While we wait for a fix, there’s not much you can do on your end. If your Microsoft apps are acting up, you can try to work with any of the offline tools you have access to. If you have other means of communication other than Teams, run with that. There’s nothing short of Microsoft issuing a patch on their end that will bring back online functionality here.

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