It’s Friday the 13th and for many businesses, their nightmare scenario has occurred: Microsoft is down. Most people don’t think about email until it stops working, but on 12th November, it went down for businesses everywhere. Outlook stopped connecting, which also affected Teams and Copilot, with the issue lasting until Friday morning. If you get enquiries by email, you could be losing leads, so check your lead process right away.
Some problems are easy to spot, like an inbox that won’t load or a Teams call that fails. Other issues are less obvious, showing up on your website, in enquiry forms or how people search for help when something breaks.
What happened with the Microsoft outage?
Trouble began around 16:00 GMT on Thursday, when users started reporting that Outlook wouldn’t connect to their mailboxes. Within an hour, Downdetector logged problems from 74 countries. Microsoft widened its warning to users worldwide.
Exchange Online, the email service quietly running behind Outlook for most businesses, was at the centre of it. Teams and Microsoft 365 Copilot struggled too because so much of Microsoft’s office suite leans on that same mailbox layer.
Microsoft changed its explanation as the evening went on, which usually means things are not going smoothly. At first, it blamed high traffic, then said some servers had become unavailable, which put too much pressure on the remaining ones.
By Friday morning, Microsoft was rolling back a recent network change, although it hadn’t confirmed that change as the cause. Executive Charles Lamanna said there was “no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity” behind the disruption.
What to do if you’re affected
Only Microsoft can fix the problem, so your main job is to limit the disruption while you wait. Taking a few simple steps now can save you time cleaning up later when mailboxes are working again.
Check the status page before you make changes
Check Microsoft’s service status page or the @MSFT365Status account on X before trying to fix your own laptop. Rebuilding Outlook profiles or reinstalling Office won’t solve the problem and could erase your offline mail.
If you use desktop Outlook in cached mode, you can still see emails that downloaded before the outage, so keep it open if you can. This cached copy lets you read recent conversations and calendars even while Exchange Online is down.
Move urgent conversations somewhere else
Move urgent client conversations to phone or text. Let clients know how to reach your team until email is back. Remind staff not to use personal email accounts, since your IT team can’t monitor those business conversations.
Japan’s digital ministry said agencies with backup channels in place kept working consistently during the disruption. Setting up a plan like this is easy and can prevent a lot of stress during future outages.
Treat every “Microsoft support” message with suspicion
Scammers take advantage of outages by sending fake password resets and support offers when people are confused. Be suspicious of any unexpected call or email giving a quick fix. Always check with official Microsoft channels first.
Microsoft Defender’s Safe Links might not have checked URLs in Outlook and Teams during the outage. Remind staff to be careful with links that came in during the disruption, even after things seem back to normal.
Log the downtime for a service credit
Make a simple note of which services stopped working for your business, and when they failed and recovered. Microsoft doesn’t give service credits automatically, so an admin needs to submit a claim, usually before the end of the next month.
What the outage means for your SEO
An email outage might not seem related to search rankings, but it matters when your website sends enquiries to an inbox. These effects are mostly indirect, so they often go unnoticed until someone reviews the monthly lead numbers.
Your rankings shouldn’t move
Google looks at your website pages, so a broken Outlook connection won’t affect your ranking. Microsoft also didn’t report any Azure issues, so most Azure-hosted websites should’ve stayed online during the outage.
The only exception is for sites that use Microsoft 365 services to load content, like files from SharePoint. If those pages didn’t load for crawlers, the problem should go away once Microsoft fixes things, but it’s best to confirm with a new crawl.
Your enquiries might be stuck
Any contact form that sends submissions to an Outlook mailbox may have delayed or lost leads during the outage. People still visited your site and filled out forms, but those messages might not have reached anyone.
Most WordPress form plugins save a copy of each submission in your website database, so compare those entries with your inbox. If you find any missing leads, reply to them before the prospect moves on to a competitor.
Analytics can be misleading here, since conversion tracking usually counts a form as complete as soon as it’s submitted. This means your reports may look fine, even if real enquiries are stuck between your website and Microsoft’s servers.
“Is it down?” searches find the big sites first
Outages cause a rush of panicked searches, and Downdetector or major news sites usually appear at the top within minutes. This happens for smaller brands too whenever their platform or app has problems.
If customers search to see whether your service is down, a good status page helps Google show your answer first. If not, a third-party outage tracker will tell your story, often with unhappy comments below.
What people searched during the outage
Search data shows how people actually react when a tool stops working, which is often different from how businesses describe the issue. The table below shows the most important terms, using average monthly UK search numbers from Ahrefs.
| What you searched | Search Volume | Average monthly traffic |
| is outlook down | 5,900 | 23,162 (March ‘25) |
| microsoft outage | 1,400 | 258,813 (July ‘24) |
| copilot down | 1,200 | 4,871 (December ‘25) |
People search for the product they use
“Is outlook down” averages 5,900 UK searches a month, while “microsoft outage” averages just 1,400 over the same period. People search for the tool sitting in front of them, which is also why “microsoft outlook outage” outperforms the wider Microsoft terms.
This habit is important for your own content, since customers use the product names they see every day to describe their problems. Our data insights work begins with this gap between company language and what people actually search for.
The phrasing shows real urgency
Most of these searches are questions, and people want answers fast. “Is outlook down right now” gets 800 UK searches a month and “is outlook still down” adds another 250.
Ahrefs also shows 450 monthly UK searches for “why is microsoft stock down,” so investors are looking for answers too. One outage brings many different audiences, and each needs a specific answer from the same results page.
Big outages dwarf everyday searches
The CrowdStrike incident in July 2024 caused “microsoft outage” to reach 258,813 UK searches in one month, over 100 times the usual amount. The Azure outage in October 2025 led to 23,754 searches, showing how quickly these terms can spike and then drop.
At the start of 2024, hardly anyone searched for “copilot down,” but by December 2025, it peaked at 4,871 searches. This rise shows how quickly AI assistants have become important enough that people notice when they’re gone.
Downdetector beats Microsoft’s own status page
“Downdetector” gets 17,000 UK searches a month, while “microsoft 365 status” only gets 250. People trust independent trackers more than the company itself during an outage, so keep this in mind before relying only on your own status page.
Common questions
Should my business publish content about the outage?
Reactive content is most effective when it answers questions your customers are actually asking, best within a day of the news. Our digital PR team uses these instances to get coverage, but a weak opinion piece rarely gets results.
How do I find enquiries that never reached my inbox?
Most form plugins store submissMost form plugins save submissions in your website database, so export entries from 12th November onward and compare them. Reply to any missing leads today, and include a short note explaining that the Microsoft outage caused the delay.
Is Outlook safe to use once it comes back?
Once mailboxes are restored, they should work as usual, but delayed emails might arrive all at once and sometimes out of order. Double-check any messages that came in during the outage, especially those with unexpected links or attachments.
Keep the leads flowing when the tools stop
Microsoft will eventually fix Outlook, but any leads lost during the outage won’t return on their own. Checking your form entries against your inbox is likely the most important thing you can do today.
Search data shows how people look for help when something suddenly stops working. When under pressure, they use simple product names and usually trust the first answer they find.
If you want to see how well your site captures this kind of demand, our technical SEO team can help. Book a free strategy session, and we’ll show you where your search traffic turns into leads and where it doesn’t.
