LBMA Email Disrupted by Microsoft 365 Outage: Urgent Inquiries Directed to Phone

The notice is short, but it shows how a cloud incident affects ordinary work. LBMA warns that replies to email inquiries may be delayed. Anyone with an urgent matter should call +44 (0) 20 7796 3067 instead of sending another email. LBMA thanked people for their patience and said it will post more updates when it has them. It gave no time for the next update and has not said its service is back.

What LBMA confirmed, and what it did not​

The notice is limited in scope, and it's worth reading closely:

• Affected: Some email and communication services. The notice does not say all of them.
• Practical effect: Replies to email inquiries may be slow.
• Workaround: Call the London number above for urgent matters. The page still lists email addresses for general contact, enquiries and press. Since email is the affected channel, phone is the better choice when something is urgent.
• Cause: LBMA blames the global Microsoft 365 outage. It gives no technical detail, no Microsoft incident number and no time when its own problems started.

The notice says nothing about bullion trading, market functions or any specific LBMA digital service, and nothing in it suggests those were affected. This is a communications problem at a standards body. It is not evidence of a market disruption.

Bottom line: LBMA's email is slow, its phones work, and it has not announced a fix yet.

The wider Microsoft 365 outage​

LBMA's problems are one small part of a much larger incident. Cybersecuritynews.com reported that a major Microsoft 365 outage disrupted cloud service access on November 12 and continued into November 13, 2026, as Microsoft worked to restore failing infrastructure. In its first public message, Microsoft said it was investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas.

Admins can follow the incident under two IDs in the Microsoft 365 admin center. According to earlier WindowsForum coverage, the incidents are tracked as EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center. EX1550543 covers Exchange Online mailbox access. MO1550821 covers the wider Microsoft 365 impact.

Exchange Online is the main problem. Avannubo's summary says Outlook and Exchange Online are the main services affected, with knock-on effects on features in other services that depend on email and calendars. The impact is uneven. Macworld noted that features that depend on Exchange Online were particularly affected, although not every function within each Microsoft service stopped working. A Microsoft status update reposted by managed service provider Magna5 said core Teams features were mostly working, including calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages. Calendar scheduling, invites and other features that rely on Exchange were failing.

This matches what LBMA describes. Its email is affected while other channels keep working.

Consumers were hit as well. SystemDesign.academy reported that by the morning of November 13, Microsoft's status page for consumers said Outlook.com, OneDrive, OneNote, To Do, Teams and Microsoft 365 for the web were affected for personal accounts too.

What Microsoft has said about the cause​

Microsoft's explanation has changed several times during the incident:

1. Early on, SystemDesign.academy reported, Microsoft said servers in the Exchange Online service, which holds Outlook mail and calendars, were failing their health checks and dropping out of service, which overloaded the rest.
2. In a post just after midnight on November 13, Microsoft said the restored servers could become unresponsive again once they received traffic.
3. In a later update reposted by Magna5, Microsoft said a process on the affected servers that sets up secure connections was getting overwhelmed. It was also rolling back a recent network configuration change whose timing matched the start of the problems.
4. Later on November 13, according to a Japanese university IT service desk tracking MO1550821, Microsoft reported positive results for server stability after applying an upstream authentication/routing configuration component patch to a portion of our infrastructure.

Is this an attack? Microsoft says there's no sign of one. Microsoft said at 03:34 UTC on 13 November that there was no indication it was the result of malicious activity. Microsoft has still not published a final root cause. In the Magna5 repost, the company said it will release a full Post-Incident Report after the problem is fully fixed.

Recovery status​

Recovery was under way but not finished at the time of the latest reports. Macworld, citing the Guardian's live blog, reported that Microsoft says it has completed recovery actions in Asia-Pacific and this recovery work is being extended to other regions. In its 11:00 UTC update on November 13, reposted by Magna5, Microsoft said service health was still variable and capacity had not fully returned to normal. Cybersecuritynews.com advised that organizations should distinguish partial recovery from stable service, particularly because restored servers became unresponsive under traffic.

Bottom line: The outage centers on Exchange Online and is now global. Microsoft has offered a likely cause but not a final root cause, and recovery is happening region by region.

What this means for people emailing LBMA​

If you work with LBMA, as a member firm, refiner, journalist or anyone else, here is what to do:

• For anything time-sensitive, call +44 (0) 20 7796 3067. This is the workaround LBMA itself recommends.
• Don't keep resending the same email. In the update reposted by Magna5, Microsoft said it was prioritizing its email queue and backlog. It also extended the email timeout window to 48 hours so that delayed messages are kept. Mail that is stuck should arrive eventually, and duplicates only make the backlog bigger.
• Expect replies to come in late and out of order as the backlog clears.
• Check LBMA's website for updates. LBMA says it will post more information there.

What IT admins can learn from this​

LBMA's notice is a good example of incident communication from an affected organization. It's short, it doesn't overstate the problem, it doesn't guess at the cause, and it gives people a working alternative. Here's what admins dealing with the same outage can take from it:

1. Track the official incidents. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, WindowsForum's earlier guidance is to go to Health > Service health, then open EX1550543 for mailbox access and MO1550821 for wider impact. Early in the incident, Magna5 noted that Microsoft's public status page was down and updates were going out through the Microsoft 365 Status account on X. Keep that backup channel in mind.
2. Post your status somewhere that doesn't depend on Microsoft 365. LBMA used its website. If your outage notices go out only by email, nobody will see them during an email outage.
3. Have a non-email contact route ready. A phone line, portal or chat that doesn't run on Exchange Online is your fallback. Magna5 did this with its own customers, pointing them to its client portal, chat and phone.
4. Warn staff about scams. WindowsForum's earlier coverage advised admins to warn users about phishing emails and fake support calls that exploit the outage. When people are frustrated, a fake "re-verify your mailbox" email is more likely to work.
5. Don't call it fixed too early. Restored servers fell over again once traffic returned, so wait for stable service before telling users the outage is over.

Analysis: why one short notice matters​

On its own, a precious-metals standards body saying its email is slow is a small story. Taken together with many similar notices, it shows how much daily business depends on Exchange Online. When one part of Microsoft's infrastructure fails, very different organizations hit the same problem at the same moment.

There is a fair counterpoint. Running email on-premises has outages too, and those are usually dealt with by smaller teams with fewer resources. The cloud doesn't remove outages. It means many organizations have them at once, and fixing them is up to someone else.

The practical takeaway is to plan for the outage you can't fix yourself. LBMA had a phone number and a public web page ready. That doesn't sound like much, but on a day when email isn't arriving, it's what kept people able to reach the organization.

LBMA's notice still lists the disruption as ongoing. Microsoft has promised a Post-Incident Report with the root cause once the problem is fully fixed. Until then, LBMA's advice is to call if it's urgent and to expect email replies to be slow.