If Outlook and Teams have let you down today, you’re not on your own
Microsoft 365 is still struggling this Friday, on the second day of a global outage. Problems began at about 4pm on Thursday 12 November, and overnight fixes didn’t hold. This morning, servers Microsoft had brought back were failing again across Europe. Outlook has been hit hardest, with Teams, Copilot and OneDrive caught up in it too.
Here in the UK, the government says it is working closely with Microsoft, councils have warned that online forms may be affected, and Dorset Police has asked people to phone rather than rely on online contact.
For a lot of businesses in Salisbury and across Wiltshire, that has meant a morning of missing emails, cancelled calls and staff asking each other whether it’s “just me”. So here’s what’s happening, what it means for a small business, and what you can do to be better placed next time.
What Caused the Microsoft 365 Outage
Microsoft says a number of its servers became unexpectedly unavailable. That pushed extra load onto the servers that were still running, and some of those struggled too. When engineers restarted affected servers, some of them fell over again as soon as normal traffic returned, so Microsoft had to bring services back slowly.
Outlook was hit hardest. Many people couldn’t open their mailbox at all, whether on the web, the desktop app or their phone, and plenty of emails arrived hours late. Teams chats and calls mostly kept working, although some users had problems.
Two things are worth knowing.
First, Microsoft has said there is no sign this was a cyber attack. It looks like a fault inside Microsoft’s own systems, not a breach.
Second, your emails should not be lost. Microsoft extended the window for delivering delayed email to 48 hours, so messages sent to you during the outage should still come through as things recover.
At the time of writing (Friday lunchtime), Microsoft says mailbox access is improving but some intermittent issues may continue. It has promised a full report on the cause once recovery is complete.
Why a Microsoft 365 Outage Hits Small Businesses Hardest
It’s easy to think of an outage like this as a problem for large corporations. In practice, smaller businesses often feel it more.
A large company usually has an IT department watching Microsoft’s service status, telling staff what’s going on and switching to backup ways of working. A business with ten or twenty people often has none of that. Everyone just finds that email has stopped and starts guessing.
Here’s what an afternoon without Microsoft 365 usually looks like for an SME:
- Customers can’t reach you. Enquiries, orders and quotes sent by email sit in a queue somewhere, and the customer doesn’t know whether you’ve seen them.
- Your own contacts disappear. If your phone numbers live in Outlook, you can’t easily pick up the phone to call people instead.
- Work stops in odd places. Files stored in OneDrive or SharePoint may not open, so the proposal due this afternoon can’t be finished.
- Time gets wasted. Staff restart laptops, reset passwords and reinstall apps trying to fix a problem that was never on their side.
Watch Out for Microsoft Outage Scams
This is the part that worries us most, and it gets far less attention than the outage itself.
Whenever a big service goes down, scammers follow. They know thousands of people are frustrated and looking for a fix, so they send emails and texts that look like they come from Microsoft, asking you to “restore your mailbox”, “verify your account” or reset your password through a link.
Microsoft won’t ask you to do any of that. If a message about the outage asks you to click a link and sign in, treat it as suspicious and check with whoever looks after your IT first.
There are a few other risks in the clean-up:
- Staff working around the problem. When work email is down, people sometimes send business documents from personal Gmail or Hotmail accounts. That’s understandable, but it means company data is now sitting somewhere you don’t control.
- Unnecessary changes. Password resets, reinstalled apps and changed settings made in a panic can cause their own problems later, and none of them would have fixed a fault on Microsoft’s side.
- Missed messages. When delayed emails arrive in a rush, it’s easy for an important one to be buried.
Getting back online is one thing. Getting back online safely, without opening a new door for criminals, is what matters.
How IT Support Gets Your Business Back Online Safely
An outage like this one isn’t something your IT provider can fix. It’s Microsoft’s system and only Microsoft can repair it. What good IT support does is take the confusion out of the day and make sure you come out of it in good shape.
On a day like today, that should look like this:
- Spotting it early. Proactive monitoring means your IT team often knows something is wrong before your staff do. They can check Microsoft’s own service health reports and tell you quickly whether the problem is on your side or theirs.
- Telling you what’s going on. A quick message to say “this is a Microsoft problem, don’t reset anything, we’ll update you” saves hours of wasted effort and stops people making changes that cause trouble later.
- Keeping you working where possible. That might mean pointing people to the Teams chats that still work, sharing a list of key phone numbers, or setting up a temporary way to receive urgent enquiries.
- Warning staff about scams. A short reminder that Microsoft won’t ask anyone to sign in through a link can stop a phishing email doing real damage while everyone is distracted.
- Checking everything afterwards. Once services come back, a good team makes sure mailboxes are syncing properly, delayed emails have arrived, nothing unusual happened to accounts during the disruption and any work saved in the wrong place is moved back where it belongs.
How to Prepare Your Business for the Next Outage
Outages like this are rare, but they do happen, and this won’t be the last. A few simple steps make a big difference. Keep an offline list of key phone numbers so you can still call customers and suppliers. Agree a backup way for the team to talk, even if it’s just a WhatsApp group. Make sure everyone knows who to call about IT problems, and remind staff that scams spike after every major outage.
The step people most often miss is a separate Microsoft 365 backup, because they assume they already have one. Microsoft looks after keeping its service running, but if emails or files are deleted, corrupted or locked by ransomware, getting them back depends on your own backup. We explain more about this in our post on what happens to your business data if your IT systems go down.
If you’d like to go further, a disaster recovery plan sets out how quickly you need each system back and what to do while you wait. It sounds formal, but for most small businesses it fits on a few pages.
Local IT Support in Salisbury When It Matters
Days like today are when it really shows whether your IT support is proactive, not reactive. You can’t stop Microsoft having a bad day. You can make sure your business knows what’s happening, stays safe from the scams that follow and gets back to normal quickly.
If today has left you wondering what you’d do next time, our IT support team will be pleased to take a look at how your business is set up. Book a free consultation, call us on 01722 777999, or drop in for a cup of tea at Old Sarum and we’ll talk it through.
