On Thursday, November 12, a Microsoft 365 outage took down Outlook and disrupted Teams, Copilot and other apps for businesses and government agencies in the US, Australia and Japan. It ran for about 12 hours and spilled into Friday, Reuters reported. Microsoft said a recent configuration change correlated with the start of the outage, and that it was rolling that change back, according to the Guardian.
I've used Microsoft 365 for years. Honestly, it's one of the best value-for-money subscriptions I've ever had, because I share it with friends and can install it on many devices. For $100 a year, five people get Microsoft's suite and a terabyte of OneDrive storage, which will soon become two. On Friday morning, though, when Outlook wouldn't sync my email, it was anything but pleasant.
Here's the thing. In July 2024, Microsoft could point at someone else: the CrowdStrike crash came from a third-party update. This time, by Microsoft's own account, the trouble started inside its own house.
That changes how I read the Weaknesses box in my Microsoft SWOT analysis. Reliability no longer looks like a partner's accident. It looks like a pattern, since Reuters notes this isn't the first 365 outage this year.
And it lands just as Microsoft asks companies to build their work around Copilot.
Below, I go through what this changes in Microsoft's SWOT, three scenarios for what comes next, and what it means for IT buyers.
What changes in Microsoft's SWOT
| Box | Before | After Nov 12 | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strengths | One bundle: email, files, chat, AI | Intact, but also a single point of failure | Features that depended on Exchange Online went down with it |
| Weaknesses | Reliability as an occasional incident | ↑ Repeated, and apparently self-inflicted | Configuration change; fixes that didn't hold |
| Opportunities | Copilot upsell across the 365 base | Delayed | Copilot was down too, along with OpenAI's and Anthropic's 365 connectors |
| Threats | Google Workspace, AWS | ↑ | Buyers have a fresh argument for a second provider |
Weaknesses. The detail that matters most to me isn't the 130,000 Downdetector reports. It's that Microsoft's fixes didn't hold: servers came back, then failed again once traffic returned (Guardian).
Mind you, no cloud is immune. Nevertheless, customers forgive a vendor's partner more easily than the vendor itself.