Liputan6.com, Jakarta - Technology giant Microsoft has been hit with a series of significant disruptions in January 22, 2026
From Microsoft 365 cloud services to Windows 11 operating system updates, numerous technical issues emerged one after another.
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A major Microsoft 365 outage on January 22, 2026, culminated in a series of issues, with tens of thousands of users experiencing difficulty accessing email, communicating via Teams, and using other critical features.
Furthermore, a Windows 11 security update earlier in the month also triggered a series of critical bugs that disrupted Remote Desktop functionality and even caused device shutdown issues.
In a statement Thursday night, a Microsoft spokesperson told CBS News: "We are working to address a service functionality issue. A subset of customers may be intermittently impacted. For more information, please see updates via Microsoft 365 Status on X."
Microsoft 365 Mass Outage on January 22, 2026
On January 22, 2026, the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity service experienced a major outage, causing thousands of users in North America to experience various issues.
User reports began to surge around 1:38 PM ET, with several Microsoft services suddenly going down around 11:40 AM Pacific Time.
The incident resulted in intermittent email delivery failures, portal timeouts, and decreased functionality across critical services.
Many Microsoft services were significantly impacted, including Exchange Online (Outlook), where users experienced problems sending and receiving email, even receiving the error message "451 4.3.2 temporary server issue."
Microsoft Teams was also disrupted, with users having difficulty creating chats, meetings, teams, or adding members.
Additionally, the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, security portals like Defender and Purview, search in SharePoint Online and Microsoft OneDrive, and sensitivity label enforcement in Microsoft Fabric also experienced decreased functionality.
Microsoft identified the cause of the incident as "a portion of the service's infrastructure in the North America region not processing traffic as expected," which it attributed to backend infrastructure issues and load imbalance.
The company quickly acknowledged the incident with the identifier MO1221364 and stated that engineers were working to restore the infrastructure.
A Series of Critical Bugs in Windows 11 Security Updates
Early 2026 also brought a series of serious issues for Windows 11 users following the release of cumulative updates KB5073455 for version 23H2 and KB5074109 for versions 24H2/25H2.
One of the most critical issues was Remote Desktop and Azure Virtual Desktop access failures caused by update KB5074109.
Many remote workers reported being unable to connect to corporate infrastructure due to authentication regressions, where the credential prompt window failed to appear or simply closed.
Microsoft responded by releasing the Out-of-Band (OOB) update KB5077744 on January 17, 2026, to fix this issue.
Windows 11 version 23H2 users also encountered the "Zombie PC" phenomenon, where devices refused to shut down after installing KB5073455, especially on devices with the System Guard Secure Launch feature enabled.
When users selected 'Shut Down,' the PC would automatically restart.
A similar issue was reported with update KB5074109 for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2, which was later addressed with the emergency update KB5077797.
Furthermore, this update caused an outage with Outlook Classic, where the outlook.exe process continued to run in the background after the application was closed, making the application unresponsive when reopened.
Other reports also mentioned issues such as Hyper-V and virtualization systems hanging on reboot, as well as some cases of black screens after login.
Previous Incidents Before
The day before, on January 21, 2026, thousands of users experienced issues accessing Outlook and Teams.
At the peak of the outage, over 4,000 complaints were recorded, indicating the scale of the problem.
Microsoft acknowledged the issue and stated that it was investigating reports affecting Teams and Outlook.
The outage is believed to have been caused by a problem related to a third party, likely an unnamed ISP, which disrupted the connection between Microsoft services and the applications.
While the issue was quickly resolved, this series of incidents underscores the ongoing challenge of maintaining the stability of digital services globally.