The short answer: on Thursday 12 November 2026, a fault inside Microsoft's cloud took Outlook email offline for businesses around the world and disrupted Teams, Microsoft 365 and Copilot. Microsoft says it was not a cyber attack, and recovery was still slow and patchy on Friday. Our own email and websites, and the websites we host for clients, kept working throughout, because none of them run on Microsoft's servers. There's no clever trick behind that, just a decision about where things live, and it's one any small business can make.
What happened in the Microsoft outage?
Problems started late on Thursday afternoon, UK time, when people found they couldn't open their mailboxes in Outlook on the web, in the desktop app or on their phones. Within about an hour, the outage tracker Downdetector had logged reports from 74 countries and territories, according to Al Jazeera. The trouble was first flagged in the Americas and quickly spread around the world.
Outlook took the worst of it. Emails that did get through often arrived hours late. Teams, Copilot and the wider Microsoft 365 suite were disrupted too, along with some of the security and device management tools IT teams rely on to keep watch. Government departments in several countries were among those hit.
Microsoft said the outage involved "a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable". More than 12 hours in, it reported only "marginal success" in restoring its most widely used services, and by Friday morning in Europe some of the servers it had brought back were failing again. As we write this on Friday 13 November, service is returning gradually and Microsoft has not yet published a root cause. If you want to know whether it's fixed for you, Microsoft's service status page is the place to check.
This isn't the first time this year, either. Microsoft 365 went down across North America for almost ten hours in January, and thousands of Outlook users were locked out of their mailboxes in late summer.
Why did one fault stop so many businesses at once?
Because so many businesses keep everything in the same place. For a typical small firm on Microsoft 365, the email, the calendar, the shared files, the video calls and often the login to everything else all come from one supplier. On a normal day that's convenient. On a bad day, a single fault in someone else's data centre stops your inbox, your meetings and your customers' messages at the same moment, and there is nothing you can do from your end except wait.
The real cost is rarely the email you couldn't read. It's the enquiry that never arrived, the quote that sat in an outbox overnight, and the customer who emailed twice, heard nothing back and went to someone else.
Why did our systems keep working?
Our email and websites, and the websites we host for clients, run on independent, UK-based hosting that has nothing to do with Microsoft's cloud. When Outlook went down on Thursday afternoon, our mail kept sending and arriving as normal. The automated emails we send every day went out on time. And because the websites we host don't sit on Microsoft's servers either, the outage never touched them.
We'd be lying if we said we can never have a bad day. Every provider can, ours included, which is why we keep backups and publish a phone number and WhatsApp line that work whatever happens to email. But this week's problem was Microsoft's, and because we had deliberately kept our systems off Microsoft's servers, it never reached us.
What should a small business do before the next outage?
You don't need an IT department to protect yourself. Five things make most of the difference:
- List what depends on which supplier. Email, website, phones, payments, bookings, files. If the same company's name appears on almost every line, that's your weak point.
- Make sure your website doesn't need your inbox to work. Every enquiry from your site should be saved on the website itself and sent to two addresses, one of them outside your main email provider.
- Own your domain name and its settings. Whoever controls your domain controls where your email goes. If it's sitting in an old supplier's account, get it back now while nothing is on fire.
- Give customers a second way to reach you. A phone number and WhatsApp on every page of your site mean people can still get through when email can't.
- Keep a two-line status message ready. Something like "Our email is delayed because of a Microsoft outage. Please call or WhatsApp us." Posted on your website and social pages within five minutes, it stops customers assuming you've gone quiet.
How CREATE can help
We build, host and look after websites and email for small businesses on independent UK hosting, away from the big shared clouds. That's why this week was an ordinary week for us and for the websites we run.
If you're on Microsoft 365 and happy with it, you don't have to move. We can look at how your website, enquiries and domain are set up, find the places where one supplier's bad day becomes yours, and fix them: enquiry forms that keep a copy of every message, a second delivery route that doesn't depend on Microsoft, your domain back in your own hands, and a clear way for customers to reach you when email can't. If you'd rather take your email off Microsoft altogether, we can do that too, without losing a single message along the way.
Book a call and we'll tell you honestly where your business is exposed and what it would take to fix it.
Frequently asked questions
Was the Microsoft outage a cyber attack?
Microsoft says not. A senior Microsoft executive said there was "no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity", and a later status update said there was no evidence of malicious activity. The company has not yet published the root cause.
Is Outlook working again?
On Friday 13 November 2026, service was coming back gradually, and Microsoft warned that apps may reconnect in stages rather than all at once. Check Microsoft's service status page for the latest position.
Will emails sent to me during the outage still arrive?
Most should, just late. Sending mail servers keep retrying delivery for several days, so messages held up during the outage should come through as service recovers. If you were expecting something important, ask the sender to check it went and resend it if not.
Should my business leave Microsoft 365?
Not necessarily. Microsoft 365 is a good product, and one outage isn't a reason to rip it out. The better fix is making sure your website, your enquiries and your domain don't depend on it, so the next outage is an inconvenience rather than a hole in your sales.
Was CREATE affected by the Microsoft outage?
No. Our email and websites, and the websites we host for clients, run on independent, UK-based hosting rather than Microsoft's cloud, so they carried on as normal.
