On 12 November 2026, Microsoft's Outlook stopped sending and receiving email for business and personal users. The problems started in the Americas, spread to other regions, and for many teams lasted for hours.
What happened
- Services affected: Outlook, and according to Microsoft also Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and Defender XDR. Consumers also lost access to OneDrive and Office for the web.
- The cause, as Microsoft described it: first "elevated load", with traffic being redistributed across its infrastructure; later, a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable.
- Not the first this autumn: Microsoft's previous major incident was a days-long Microsoft 365 outage in September, which it put down to a core authentication configuration issue.
Why it matters for your business
When email, chat, meetings and files all live with one provider, one outage stops all of them at once. For a small business, that means missed customer emails, meetings moved to personal phones, and staff improvising with personal accounts, which brings security problems of its own.
Most businesses don't need to leave Microsoft 365. They need a plan for the hours it's down.
Ready for the next outage?
A standby Google Workspace, set up and tested before you need it, keeps email and meetings running when Microsoft 365 is down.
How to keep working next time
Google offers a product built for this: Google Workspace for Business Continuity, a standby environment you set up before an outage. When Microsoft 365 goes down, you point your email routing to Google and your team signs in to Gmail, Meet and Docs.
- Business Continuity: an isolated standby for leadership and critical teams, starting fresh.
- Business Continuity Plus: a hot standby, where synced email, calendar events and chat messages can be available.
- Set up in advance: Google designed it to be deployed before a disruption, and you can run up to four failover tests a year.
How D3V can help
We plan the standby with you, set up the accounts, directory and data sync, write the runbook and rehearse the switch, so the next outage is a routine rather than a scramble. See how it works on our email continuity for Microsoft 365 page, or book a free continuity consultation.
Sources: TechCrunch, 12 November 2026; About Google Workspace for Business Continuity, Google.
