On Thursday afternoon, 12 November, Outlook stopped working for businesses around the world. From around 16:00 UK time, people couldn’t open their mailboxes, and emails arrived hours late or not at all. Within an hour, users in 74 countries and territories had reported problems, and Outlook reports on Downdetector peaked at nearly 140,000 around 18:00 GMT.
By Friday the outage had stretched into a second day. Microsoft says services are now being gradually restored, but warns that some intermittent issues may continue.
The outage started in Exchange Online, the service behind Outlook, and spread to the tools that depend on it:
Microsoft said a number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, which overloaded the rest, and that there is no sign of a cyberattack. It also warned that services that had come back could become unresponsive again, in any region.
The disruption reached far beyond office workers checking their inbox. According to CNN’s live coverage, banks, governments and courts in several countries were affected, and the US House of Representatives had its engineers working with Microsoft. City governments across the US asked residents to phone instead of emailing, and one sheriff’s office said bail payments were delayed. In the UK, a disruption to the NHS email system was expected to stop some patients from getting their prescriptions on time. One listed company even postponed its quarterly earnings call, citing the outage.
Outages happen to every cloud provider, and no platform is immune. The problem isn’t that Microsoft had a bad day. It’s that for many organisations, Microsoft is the day: email, calendar, meetings, files and AI assistants all sit on the same foundation. When that foundation fails, everything stops at once.
The question worth asking now is simple: if this happened again tomorrow, how would your team keep working?
Since Thursday, we’ve had organisations contacting us urgently about Google Workspace licences. Some want a backup so an outage like this can’t stop them again. Others are ready to move completely. Here’s how we help, depending on where you are:
👉 One honest note: a company-wide switch doesn’t happen overnight. Rolling out thousands of accounts safely takes planning, even with the best tools. That’s why the best time to set up a backup is before the next outage, not during it.
To see what a move involves, start with Google’s free guide, Migrating your data to Google Workspace. Or talk to us directly: we’ll look at your setup and tell you honestly what’s realistic, and how fast.