By Fusion Creative · 13 November 2026
On 12 November, a global Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot. Some Outlook users reported being unable to send or receive emails or load their inboxes. Others had trouble connecting to Teams. For businesses that use both, an email delay and a missed meeting could come from the same incident. BBC live coverage · Associated Press reporting
Think about a website launch. The client’s approval is in an email thread, the handover call is on Teams and the latest launch checklist is in a shared folder. Each tool does a different job. If they all depend on the same provider, a single outage can make it harder to get the approval, join the call and find the checklist at the same time.
How much of your working day depends on one provider?
There are good reasons to use a suite like Microsoft 365. Your calendar, email and meetings work together, and your team has fewer systems to learn and manage. For a small business, that can save time every day.
The dependency becomes clearer when you look at how people actually work. If your team loses access to email, where do they find a client’s phone number? If a meeting link stops working, how will everyone get the replacement link? If a client fills in your website contact form while your inbox is unavailable, can you still find and respond to the enquiry?
At Fusion Creative, that last question is especially relevant. A website can be online and accepting enquiries while the inbox that normally receives them is inaccessible. If your form stores submissions in an accessible dashboard, your team may still be able to pick them up. It’s worth checking where those submissions go and whether the dashboard relies on the same sign-in.
Give essential work a second route
You can keep your everyday tools and put a few fallbacks in place for the work that would be hardest to pause.
- Client communication. Keep essential phone numbers somewhere approved that your team can access without opening the main inbox. Agree who calls or texts clients if a deadline or meeting is affected.
- Meetings. Have an alternative call option that works independently of your usual platform and sign-in. Make sure you can share the dial-in details without relying on the original calendar invite.
- Time-sensitive files. Keep an approved offline copy of the small set of documents you’d need to get through a working day, such as a launch checklist or the latest agreed project schedule. Decide who keeps those copies current.
- Website enquiries. Submit a test enquiry and check where it goes. If the notification email is delayed, find out whether the submission can still be retrieved, who can access it and who is responsible for replying.
Try a 15-minute test
Pick one live project. Imagine you can’t open Outlook or Teams for the rest of the afternoon. Can you contact the client, find the latest agreed brief and tell the team what’s happening? If someone sends a new enquiry through your website, can anyone pick it up?
Wherever the answer is unclear, agree a fallback and give someone responsibility for it. The next time a service goes down, the team should already know where to look and who to call.
Want to know what happens to your website enquiries if your inbox goes down? Get in touch with Fusion Creative. We can help you trace where they go and check how you’d pick them up during an outage.
