There are currently disruptions and outages affecting various Microsoft services worldwide. Outlook, Teams, Intra, Defender XDR: in many cases, nothing is working, or services are responding only after significant delays. Don't worry, this isn't going to be another cloud-bashing piece or yet another "Microsoft is evil" article. Instead, this is about a simple question: How dependent are we, and what can we do when a central provider becomes unreachable or unavailable?
What happened?
On the afternoon of November 12 (German time), users reported that numerous Microsoft services (including services from the Microsoft 365 portfolio) were unavailable. Applications became extremely slow and sometimes stopped responding altogether. Emails were no longer being delivered. This situation is still ongoing at the time of writing (November 13, 2026, 7:46 a.m.).
Microsoft is reportedly working on a fix, although the measures taken so far have "not had the desired effect."
Outages have been reported from all corners of the world. In effect, businesses and government agencies are losing an entire working day because of the outage.
When Everything Grinds to a Halt
For businesses and government agencies, outages like these are more than just an inconvenience. Valuable working hours are lost. Emails are no longer delivered, video conferences and meetings are cancelled, and documents can no longer be shared or edited. Everything grinds to a halt. This is a particularly serious problem for government agencies, as public-facing services may also be affected. Numerous administrative processes and specialist applications are firmly tied to Microsoft, and there is no quick or easy way out of that dependency.
This is where the downside of a development becomes painfully obvious, even though the basic idea behind it is not fundamentally wrong:
Cloud services reduce the effort required to operate an organisation's own IT infrastructure. The provider takes care of updates, maintenance and many security-related tasks. This allows businesses to work more efficiently and access powerful systems without having to operate them themselves. However, this also creates a dependency that is barely noticeable, if not completely transparent during normal operations. When everything works, the entire infrastructure behind it remains largely invisible. But when problems occur, that dependency suddenly becomes all too apparent.
If large parts of an organisation's communications, various business processes or data storage are concentrated in the hands of a single provider, this creates a single point of failure. In other words, you create a single point on which almost the entire organisation depends, and which must never fail. When an outage occurs, those affected can do only one thing: wait until the issue gets resolved.
What Are the Alternatives?
None of this means that everyone should now switch back to on-premises systems or start using multiple cloud platforms. The effort involved would be disproportionate and difficult to justify economically. And it certainly cannot be done at short notice; there is simply no such thing as a quick fix in this context.
Nor would a hastily arranged migration to other platforms or an organisation's own hardware solve the problem of outages. Servers operated by other providers can fail just as easily as those in your own server room.
Planning Is Everything
This is where it becomes clear who has done their homework. More specifically, who has thought about what to do in the event of an outage. How long can we compensate for an outage using our existing resources? Do we have alternative communication channels if Teams, for example, becomes unavailable? How can we protect our core business functions from the effects of cloud outages?
The key is to take a calm, pragmatic and unbiased look at the status quo: Where are we completely dependent on everything working properly at a service provider, and how can we respond when outages occur?This is not intended as an argument for or against cloud services. Rather, it is a small reminder that even the largest companies with the most powerful infrastructures are not immune to unforeseen incidents.The most important takeaway should be that an organisation's ability to act must not move into the cloud along with its various services. Maintaining that ability remains the responsibility of the individual business or government agency.
Incidentally, this is also part of what is so often referred to these days as digital sovereignty.
