What to Do When Microsoft 365 Goes Down: A Continuity Checklist

The first 15 minutes

1. Confirm that the problem is at Microsoft. If several people lose Outlook, Teams or SharePoint at the same time, it is rarely one computer. Your Microsoft 365 administrator can check the Microsoft 365 admin center under Health, then Service health. Microsoft also posts updates on its Microsoft 365 Status account on X. Its public status page, status.cloud.microsoft, can be slow or unavailable during a large incident.
2. Change nothing on your side. Resetting passwords, removing the Outlook account or reinstalling Office will not fix a Microsoft service issue, and it can create new problems once service returns.
3. Tell staff once, through a channel that does not depend on Microsoft 365. A short text message or a phone call to each team lead is enough: Microsoft 365 is having a service issue, nothing is wrong with your account, and here is how to reach each other meanwhile.

Keep working during the outage

• Use the phone for anything urgent. Email and Teams messages can arrive late. Call clients and suppliers when a message cannot wait.
• Work from copies saved on the computer. Outlook on a computer usually keeps a copy of recent email that can still be read, although new messages will not arrive until service returns. Files that are set to stay on the device can still be opened. Save a copy of any open document on the computer before you continue.
• Move meetings to the phone. If Teams does not load, a regular phone call or conference line keeps the meeting going.
• Be careful with sign-in requests. Attackers often send fake "your mailbox is disabled" or "sign in again" emails during a well-known outage. Do not enter a password from a link in an email. Open Outlook or the Microsoft 365 portal yourself instead.

When service returns

• Check for messages that arrived late, and reply to anything time-sensitive first.
• Confirm that calendars and shared files have caught up before relying on them.
• Write down what stopped working and how long it lasted, while it is fresh. That list is the start of your plan.
• For major incidents, Microsoft usually publishes a review in the admin center afterwards. Ask your administrator to read it.

Prepare before the next outage

1. Keep a contact list outside Microsoft 365. Staff, key clients and suppliers, with phone numbers, printed or saved on phones.
2. Agree on a second way to communicate. A group text message or a simple phone tree, decided in advance, so nobody waits for an email that cannot arrive.
3. Keep the documents you cannot work without available offline. Price lists, schedules, emergency procedures and key client files.
4. Know who your Microsoft 365 administrator is, and make sure that person knows where Service health is.
5. Keep an independent backup of Microsoft 365 data. An outage is not data loss, but a separate backup of mailboxes and files protects against deletion and ransomware, and it should be tested.
6. Write it on one page and test it once a year. A plan that nobody has tried is an assumption.

For a real example, see our incident report on the Microsoft 365 outage of November 12, 2026. Related guides: how to test that a backup restores and recovering lost Microsoft 365 administrator access.