When Outlook and Teams go down, you find out quickly who keeps working, who waits for permission, and who was never given a plan.
A global Microsoft 365 outage began on Thursday and was still disrupting Outlook email and some Teams features into Friday 13 November 2026, with Microsoft rolling out a wider patch. The knock-on effects reached beyond Microsoft’s own products. OpenAI reported errors in ChatGPT’s Microsoft 365 connector, and Anthropic said most email, calendar and search requests through Claude’s Microsoft 365 connector were failing.
For early industry comments, you can find comments on News in the Channel, click here.
So the question goes first to those who run contact centres: what did your company do in the global 365 outage? Did you tell customers within the hour which routes were still open, or did you (not) tell them you were closed? And was closing a considered decision, or just what happened when the inbox went quiet?
For many offices, the interesting question is not what Microsoft is doing. It is what you, or your company, did.
Two kinds of office: The workers and the shirkers
Every outage produces the same two stories, and they are usually told about people.
The first is the worker. The inbox is dead, so they pick up the phone. They find the document that was already saved locally, draft the report offline, message a colleague on another channel, and tell their manager what is blocked and what is not. They treat the outage as a change in tools, not a change in the job.
The second is the shirker. Email is down, so nothing can be done. The kettle is on. The “Teams is down, I’ll pick this up when it’s back” message goes out at 9.15 via WhatsApp and the working day has, for practical purposes, ended.
The uncomfortable part: it is often the company, not the person
Before we judge the person staring at a frozen screen, ask, “what were they given to work with?”
- Did anyone tell them what to do? An employee with no fallback plan, no list of phone numbers and no guidance is not shirking. They are waiting for instructions that never came.
- Is the work itself stranded? If files, calendars, approvals and customer records live in one cloud service, then losing that service genuinely stops the work. No amount of effort fixes that. However, it still begs the question, what else can be done?
- Are employees afraid to improvise? In some work cultures, using an unofficial tool or phoning a client directly can invite a telling-off. People learn that standing still is safer.
An outage tests the organisation first and the individual second. A company with a tested contingency plan makes workers out of nearly everyone. A company with none makes shirkers out of the diligent.
What good looks like
The companies that cope best in a crisis tend to have done the work beforehand:
1. A named backup channel. A second way to reach people, such as a phone tree, a different messaging app or a group text, that everyone knows about before the day it is needed.
2. An offline list of what matters. Key contacts, customer numbers and procedures held somewhere that does not depend on the service that has just failed.
3. Permission to improvise. A clear message that, when systems fail, people should use their judgment and report what they did afterwards.
4. Work that can continue without the cloud. Writing, analysis, planning, calls and in-person conversations do not need a live inbox. Some tasks can wait. Many cannot.
5. A post-mortem. After the outage, a short and blame-free review of what stopped and what kept going.
The contact centre test
Nowhere is the difference clearer than in the contact centre, where customers keep calling whether or not the company’s email is working.
Some teams moved within the first hour. They told customers and sales partners which routes were still open: the phone line, EDI for trading partners, and website ordering in place of emailed orders. A customer who could not email an order was told how to place it another way, and the work carried on.
Other teams were just as quick, but with a different message: business was closed for the day. That is a decision, and sometimes it is the right one, for example when a team cannot safely take orders without its systems. But it is worth asking whether the phones, the EDI link and the website were actually down, or only the inbox.
Customers see the difference at once. One company says “here is how to reach us”. The other says “come back tomorrow”, and some of those customers will go to a competitor who answered. In a contact centre, a closed door is not neutral. It costs orders.
And the shirkers?
They exist. Some people will always use a failure as cover for a quiet day, and managers are right to notice, but an outage is a poor way to find them. If a team’s output simply stops, the useful question is whether anyone was ever expected to carry on, and whether they knew how.
So, what did your company do?
If the answer is “we sat and waited for Microsoft”, the lesson is not that your staff are lazy. It is that your business has a single point of failure, and the cost of that has just become visible. The next outage, whether from Microsoft, Google or someone else, will arrive without much notice. The workers will be ready. The question is whether the company has made it easy for them.
