Microsoft is continuing its efforts to restore services following a major global Microsoft 365 outage that has disrupted businesses worldwide, with Outlook, Exchange Online, Teams and Copilot among the services affected.
The disruption, which began on Thursday 12 November, has entered its second day. Microsoft says it is making progress, reporting improved server stability and better service availability across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. However, some customers continue to experience intermittent access problems and delayed email delivery.
For UK MSPs and IT resellers, the incident highlights the growing dependence of businesses on cloud-based platforms and the importance of having robust business continuity and disaster recovery strategies in place.
The impact extends beyond email. Services relying on Exchange Online have also experienced problems, including Teams calendar functions, meeting scheduling, Copilot integration and elements of SharePoint, Microsoft Defender and other Microsoft 365 applications. Core Teams messaging and meetings have largely remained operational.
Microsoft has said it has no evidence that the incident was caused by a cyberattack. Engineers are working on infrastructure and configuration changes to restore capacity and stability.
For channel partners, the outage provides an important reminder that customers increasingly expect their MSP to do more than simply manage software licences and cloud subscriptions. Proactive monitoring, clear customer communications, alternative working arrangements and effective contingency planning are becoming essential parts of the managed services proposition.
It also presents an opportunity for resellers to review customer resilience strategies, assess reliance on single cloud platforms and demonstrate the value of ongoing IT support.
Microsoft’s recovery efforts are continuing, with a full resolution and detailed root-cause report still awaited.
Notable comments from the industry:
Simon Azzopardi, CEO of CoreView, which provides cyber resilience for Microsoft 365 comments:
“The delay in tracing the Microsoft outage to a configuration change is noteworthy. Early on, Microsoft said that no recent change correlated with the impact. Several hours later, however, it reported that a network configuration change did correlate with the outage. If an organisation with Microsoft’s resources and telemetry needs that long to connect a change to its impact, most businesses will struggle to understand what changed in their tenant and when.
“Businesses can’t control Microsoft’s infrastructure. But they can control their own tenant. That means knowing exactly how it is configured, tracking every change made to it, and being able to restore it to a known good state quickly.
“As services recover, IT teams should do three things. Confirm that security and compliance controls such as data loss prevention, sensitivity labelling and Intune compliance policies are working as intended. Review every emergency change made during the outage, because workarounds made under pressure tend to become permanent gaps. And treat delayed email with extra caution: Microsoft warned that Safe Links might not be able to check URLs during the disruption, and attackers routinely use outages as cover.”
“Our sympathy goes out to every IT team that has spent their time keeping their organisation running without email, calendars and, in many cases, their security and compliance tools.
Digital sovereignty means more than just having control over data and where it is stored; it also means remaining operational during a disruption. If an organisation makes all its communications dependent on one platform, it effectively ties its crisis-response capability to that same platform.”
Tom Henson, COO of Emerge Digital, a leading UK technology and Managed Service Provider (MSP).
“Yet again, a major outage has shown how much businesses rely on one set of tools to keep talking to the outside world. Too many continuity plans say ‘if email goes down, we’ll use Teams’, but this time email and Teams went down together.
“So, ask yourself, if email stopped right now, could you still reach your clients and suppliers. Do you have their phone numbers somewhere outside Microsoft 365. Is there another channel, like WhatsApp, that everyone already knows to use. And, how quickly could your team actually switch over, and who makes that call. Having the right plans in place means that an outage like this is an inconvenience, not a crisis.”
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