Outlook outage: how to keep working and which email alternatives you can use

The disruption on Thursday 12 November mainly affected Outlook, but it also hit Teams, Copilot and the rest of the Microsoft 365 tools. According to reports collected by the Downdetector website, the outage was particularly widespread in the Americas.Microsoft explained on X that it had received reports from users who could not access their Exchange Online mailboxes through different connection methods in the Americas, Europe, Africa and the rest of the world.The Redmond-based company later said that part of its infrastructure was carrying a higher than normal load, which probably caused the errors, and announced that it would redistribute traffic across its systems. The Teams platform appears to be working at the moment, although some users were still reporting difficulties.How to keep working while Outlook is not respondingThe first step is to check whether the problem is still ongoing. Microsoft publishes updates on its X account, @MSFT365Status (source in Spanish), and maintains a status page at status.cloud.microsoft.If you are an administrator, Microsoft’s documentation says that the Microsoft 365 admin centre has a service status section showing open and resolved incidents, accessible to those with the service support administrator or Helpdesk admin roles.It is better not to expect too much from switching apps.