What the two publishers said
Both notices have the same wording. The notices followed a widespread Microsoft outage affecting Outlook, Teams and Copilot. The publishers' own text says customers, partners and other contacts may struggle to email their teams. Each says it has set up a temporary Gmail address for people who can't use their usual channels.
The notices also say:
- Staff are working as normal where possible and will reply as quickly as they can.
- Readers should keep using the usual contact details if those still work.
- The temporary address is only an alternative while Microsoft 365 services are disrupted.
The Intermediary added a reader poll asking how badly the Outlook outage is hurting property finance businesses. The options ran from "unable to operate normally" to "business as usual".
I'm not reproducing the addresses. The source text masks them, and they are best taken from each publisher's own site. The notices also don't say what caused the outage, how long the workaround will last, or whether mail sent to the Gmail accounts will be moved into the normal systems afterwards.
The outage behind the notices
The publishers' notices don't describe the outage itself, so here is what other reporting says.
- Scale and services: Microsoft confirmed in a Microsoft 365 admin center advisory, MO1550821, that customers might be unable to connect to Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Defender XDR. XDA-Developers' list of affected services also includes Planner, To Do and Purview.
- Reports: The Mac Observer says Downdetector recorded more than 130,000 Outlook problem reports at its peak.
- Duration: The outage was still running on Friday 13 November. BleepingComputer reported limited recovery on the evening of 12 November, after some affected servers were returned to service.
- Shaky recovery: ITdaily reported that servers Microsoft restored were failing again.
- Cause: ITdaily reported that Microsoft had not found a recent change matching the outage's start, and that Microsoft saw "no indication" of malicious activity. Microsoft hadn't confirmed a root cause in the reports I found.
- Knock-on effects: ITdaily reported that links rewritten by Safe Links in Defender for Office 365 don't open from Outlook or Teams. It also reported that the Microsoft 365 connectors for Claude and ChatGPT were failing.
Mailbox access and mail delay are the main problems. The Mac Observer says some users can't reach mailboxes on desktop, web or mobile, and delivery may be delayed. That is why a business can look fine from the inside and still miss messages from outside.
Why a Gmail workaround makes sense, and its risks
A second mail channel on a different provider is a sensible emergency step. Exchange Online and Gmail don't share infrastructure, so a Microsoft failure doesn't take down both. It is cheap and quick to set up, and it gives customers somewhere to write.
It also has costs, which is analysis from general IT practice and not something either publisher said:
- Phishing: Outages attract impersonators. A notice saying "email us at this other address" is exactly what a fraudster would copy. Confirm the address on the organisation's own website or social account, or by phone, before sending anything sensitive.
- Data handling: A free consumer mailbox isn't covered by the compliance controls, retention or audit trail of a business tenant. For regulated sectors such as mortgage intermediaries, that matters. Keep what you send to the minimum.
- Fragmented records: Messages in a side mailbox have to be merged back into the normal systems afterwards, or they get lost. Neither notice says how this will be done.
- Duplicates: If the main service delivers late, the same message can arrive twice.
What IT teams can take from this
- Check status first. Microsoft's admin center advisories are the main source. The Mac Observer points admins to incidents MO1550821 and EX1550543. If your tenant is affected, those are the tracking numbers to follow.
- Have an out-of-band channel. Decide before an incident which backup contact route you will use and who can announce it.
- Announce through trusted channels. Post the alternate address on your website and any verified social accounts, not only by email. Email may be the thing that's broken.
- Say when it ends. Tell people when to go back to normal contact details, and say how you'll deal with messages that arrived at the backup address.
- Plan for mail queuing. Senders' mail servers usually retry delivery for a while when a destination is unavailable, so some delayed mail will arrive once service returns. Don't assume nothing was lost, though. Check your own logs and ask important senders to resend.
Bottom line
The two notices are modest, but they show a real effect of a long Microsoft 365 outage: organisations using a rival's free email service to stay reachable. If you depend on someone's temporary address, verify it first. If you run a Microsoft 365 tenant, write your own fallback plan before you need it.