Microsoft 365 outage: what has happened and what your business should do now

Microsoft 365 has been suffering a major global outage since Thursday evening (12 November 2026). Outlook email, Teams, OneDrive and Copilot have been failing or crawling in more than 70 countries, hitting GP surgeries, pharmacies, schools, police forces, Parliament and thousands of small businesses. Microsoft says it is not a cyber attack and that service is starting to stabilise. Below is what we know, what to do today, and why a growing number of our clients are asking us to move them from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace.

We are writing this on Friday 13 November while the incident is still running, so some details will change. Our sources are Microsoft’s own updates and the BBC’s live coverage, plus what we are seeing first-hand in the mail logs of the businesses we look after.

What has happened

Problems started on Thursday night. By around 07:00 GMT on Friday, the monitoring site Downdetector had logged at least 43,000 reports of Outlook problems across 72 countries, after a peak of more than 130,000 reports in the US overnight. Those numbers only count people who went to Downdetector to complain. Microsoft has around 430 million Microsoft 365 users, so the real number affected is far higher.

Microsoft’s explanation so far is that a number of its servers became unexpectedly unavailable, and the remaining infrastructure buckled under the extra traffic. Think of a motorway with lanes closed: everything still has to get through, so it all backs up. That is also why the experience has been patchy. Some people have Teams working but no new email, others can open OneDrive but not Outlook, depending on which servers their organisation is served from.

Microsoft has said it is not aware of any malicious activity. Its latest update reports “early signs of stabilisation”, with traffic being “carefully reintroduced”, but capacity has not yet returned to normal. It has promised a full root-cause report once the incident is closed.

Who has been hit

This is not just an inconvenience for office workers. Because so much of the UK runs on Microsoft 365, the knock-on effects have been wide:

• The NHS. GPs report no access to NHSmail, so no prescription requests or patient emails, and referrals that normally go through encrypted Microsoft email have to be phoned through. The National Pharmacy Association has warned that waits for prescriptions may be longer. The GMB union says 111 and 999 staff cannot pass patient details in the usual way, although emergency call-outs appear unaffected.
• Schools. Many schools have asked parents to phone rather than email, including to report absences. Teachers have lost access to OneDrive resources.
• Police. The Met, Greater Manchester, North Yorkshire, South Wales and Dyfed-Powys police have warned that online forms may not be getting through, and asked people to call 101 (or 999 in an emergency).
• Parliament and government. MPs lost access to their parliamentary Microsoft accounts and “alternative communication arrangements” were put in place. A government minister said systems need to be “more resilient”.
• Businesses of every size. Readers told the BBC about lost calendars, deals they could not close and teams sitting idle. Even the BBC newsroom’s own corporate email was down.

Some things kept running. Heathrow, Manchester and Stansted airports reported no impact on operations, and the UK intelligence services use a separate system for anything secret.

What a bounce looks like right now

If you send email to anyone on Microsoft 365, Outlook.com or Hotmail today, you may get a warning back from your own mail server. This is a real one from a client’s mail log this morning (the recipient’s address is removed):

host outlook-com.olc.protection.outlook.com[52.101.60.64] said:
451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later.
PRX3 NextHop: substrate-int.office.com
[BN5PEPF00046987.namprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T09:56:19Z]

status=4.7.0
action=delayed

The important parts are 451 and action=delayed. A code starting with 4 is a temporary failure: Microsoft’s front-door server took the message, tried to pass it to the mailbox servers behind it (“NextHop: substrate-int.office.com”), could not, and asked your server to try again later. Your message has not been lost. It is sitting in your server’s queue and will be retried automatically.

So do not keep pressing send. Re-sending just adds more copies to the queue, and the recipient may get three of everything once Microsoft recovers. Microsoft has extended its email timeout window to 48 hours to protect delayed messages, and most mail servers keep retrying for several days before they give up. You only need to act if you later receive a final failure notice, usually with a code starting with 5. If emails to Microsoft are bouncing on a normal day, that is a different problem; our guides to the 550 5.7.1 S3150 rejection and email deliverability cover the usual causes.

What to do today

1. Switch to the phone for anything urgent. Call customers and suppliers rather than relying on email or Teams. If people normally contact you by email, put a short notice on your website and social media with your phone number.
2. Do not resend messages that show “delayed”. They are queued and will be delivered. For anything time-critical, phone the recipient and follow up in writing once service is back.
3. Check incoming mail when it recovers. Mail sent to you should arrive in a rush as the backlog clears. If a customer says they emailed you and it never turned up, ask them to resend.
4. Watch out for scams. Criminals use outages as cover. One BBC reader had a phone call from someone “from Microsoft” asking for login details to “restore access”. Microsoft will never phone you for your password. Expect fake “re-validate your mailbox” emails over the next few days too, and do not click them.
5. Do not start changing settings. Deleting and re-adding accounts, resetting passwords or switching DNS in a panic usually makes recovery harder. The fault is on Microsoft’s side.
6. Keep a note of what broke. Which systems stopped, who could not work and what it cost. That is exactly the information you need to plan for next time.

The bigger lesson: one provider, one point of failure

For most small businesses, Microsoft 365 is not just email. It is the calendar, the file server, the phone system (Teams), the shared drive and now the AI assistant. When it stops, everything stops at once. A cyber-security adviser on BBC Radio 4 said today’s knock-on effects “hammer home” the need for a contingency plan to communicate during incidents like this.

We would put it simply. Whatever platform you use, you should be able to answer three questions:

• How do we contact each other and our customers if email and chat are down? A phone list that is not stored only in Outlook, and a fallback channel everyone knows about.
• Do we have our own copy of our data? Microsoft keeps the service running, but it is not a backup of your mailboxes and files. See our pages on Microsoft 365 backup and the 3-2-1 backup rule for small businesses.
• Is this still the right platform for us? Many businesses ended up on Microsoft 365 by default years ago. Today is a good day to check that it is still a deliberate choice.

We specialise in moving businesses from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace

Moving email platform is one of the jobs we do most often at dijitul, and moving from Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace is our speciality. We have been looking after business email and websites from Mansfield since 2006, and we handle the whole move: planning, setup, copying every mailbox, calendar and file, the DNS switch-over and helping your team on the first morning. The full details are on our Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace migration page.

Plenty of businesses find Google Workspace a better fit. Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet and Chat all run in the browser with nothing to install, there are fewer versions and licence types to juggle, sharing files is simpler, and staff who already use Gmail at home tend to get on with it straight away. Our Microsoft 365 vs Google Workspace comparison and the email-focused comparison on dijitul DNS set out the trade-offs honestly, including where Microsoft is the better choice.

To be straight with you: Google has outages too, and no cloud service is perfect. The reason to move is that Google Workspace suits the way you work, not that it will never go wrong. Whichever you choose, we will help you put a contingency plan in place.

How a Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace migration works

1. Audit. We list every mailbox, shared mailbox, alias, distribution list, calendar and shared folder, plus anything else tied to Microsoft, such as scanners that email, website contact forms and phone systems.
2. Set up Google Workspace. We create your Workspace account, verify your domain, add your users, groups and aliases, and turn on security from day one: two-step verification, plus SPF, DKIM and DMARC so your mail keeps landing in inboxes. Details are on our Google Workspace setup page.
3. Copy the data in the background. Email, calendars and contacts move across with Google’s migration tools, and OneDrive and SharePoint files move into Google Drive and shared drives. Your team keeps working in Outlook while this happens.
4. Switch over. At a quiet time, usually an evening or weekend, we change your domain’s MX records so new mail goes to Gmail, then run a final sync to catch anything that arrived during the move. Nothing is lost in the gap. Our guide to moving email provider without losing mail explains why.
5. First morning help. We set up phones and laptops, show people where everything is, and stay on hand for the questions. Teams meetings become Google Meet, Teams chat becomes Google Chat.
6. Tidy up. Once everyone is settled, we help you cancel the Microsoft licences you no longer need, so you are not paying twice.

One honest note about timing. Copying data reads from Microsoft 365, so the bulk move has to wait until Microsoft is stable. The planning, the Google Workspace setup and the domain verification can all start today. That way, you are ready to move as soon as Microsoft recovers.

Prices

Smaller jobs are £45 an hour + VAT. For a whole business we agree a fixed quote before any work starts, so you know the cost up front. Google Workspace licences are paid to Google per user per month. If you would like ongoing help afterwards, our Google Workspace support is part of our support plans, which start at £25 a month + VAT. More detail is on the Microsoft 365 to Google Workspace and email migration pages.

Staying on Microsoft 365?

That is fine too. Not everyone should move, especially if you depend on desktop Excel macros, Access databases or other Microsoft-only software. We also support businesses on Microsoft 365 through dijitul support, covering setup, licences and fixes, along with email security and proper backups. If you would like a second opinion after today, we are happy to give one either way.

Talk to us

If today has made you rethink your email, call us on 01623 650333 or send us a message. We will tell you honestly whether moving to Google Workspace makes sense for your business, and what it would cost. Our Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace work is done by dijitul support, our IT support site, and dijitul DNS handles domains and email setup. You can see every site in the dijitul network.

Frequently asked questions

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This post was written on 13 November 2026 while the outage was still in progress. We will update it when Microsoft publishes its root-cause report. dijitul is a web design, hosting and SEO studio based in Mansfield, working with businesses across the UK since 2006. Photo by energepic.com via Pexels.