When all of a company's communication depends on a single provider, an outage at that provider cuts off the whole company at once. The fix is simple: have a second, independent channel that is already installed and already familiar to your staff. That's the job of a backup YouTim instance: installed in your organisation and on standby in normal times, it takes over within minutes with chat, announcements, a calendar, a to-do list and your essential documents.
12 November 2026: Outlook and Teams go down
On Thursday 12 November, from around 6pm UK time (shortly before 1pm in New York), Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Copilot became unavailable for many organisations across North America, Europe and Asia. Microsoft explained that a large number of servers had become unavailable, shifting the load onto the rest of its infrastructure, and said it had found no evidence of malicious activity.
The next morning, the working day began in the UK and across Europe with email still disrupted: intermittent access, delayed messages, and in some cases the ability to receive email but not to send it. More than twenty hours after the incident began, Microsoft was still describing recovery as “ongoing”.
If it happened again tomorrow at 9am, how would you reach your staff? Through which channel, with which contact details, and how would you know the instruction had been read?
It wasn't the first time
On 25 January 2023, a router change on Microsoft's network disrupted Teams, Outlook, SharePoint and Azure worldwide for around five hours.
On 19 July 2024, a faulty update to a security product (CrowdStrike, this time) crashed around 8.5 million Windows devices, according to Microsoft. Airports, hospitals, banks: screens turned blue, and with them went the company's email and chat.
Three different causes, one identical effect: staff can no longer talk to each other through the usual channels, at precisely the moment they most need to coordinate.
Microsoft 365 isn't a bad tool. The risk is total dependence: email, chat, calendar, documents and even the sign-in all go through the same provider. When it goes down, everything goes down together.
What really happens during an outage
Without a plan B, the business improvises, and the improvisation almost always follows the same script:
- a WhatsApp group set up in a hurry by a manager, with only half the team in it;
- personal mobile numbers passed around with no control;
- conflicting instructions, because several groups spring up in parallel;
- nobody knows whether the important message has actually been read;
- the crisis documents (procedures, on-call numbers, priority customers) are… on the SharePoint that's down;
- once the outage is over, those groups stay open, with company information sitting in personal apps.
A plan B has to prevent all of this: it must be ready, filled in and familiar before the outage.
The idea: a YouTim instance on standby
The principle is to keep a YouTim instance in your organisation that does nothing at all… as long as everything is working.
- Installed in your organisation: it runs on infrastructure separate from Microsoft 365 and Azure, so it doesn't go down at the same time.
- On standby: in normal times, nobody uses it day to day. It doesn't add yet another tool to your staff's working day.
- Ready: accounts created, groups set up, crisis documents already uploaded.
- Independent of the Microsoft sign-in: everyone signs in with their own YouTim credentials, not their Microsoft account, which may be unavailable too.
- On everyone's phone: the YouTim apps for iPhone and Android connect to your instance. If the PCs are out of action, the smartphone becomes the backup workstation.
- For the whole organisation: no limit on participants, from the board to every member of staff.
On the day of the outage, an administrator posts an announcement, staff find it in the app, and coordination resumes in a controlled space instead of scattering across personal groups.
Five services to keep going during the outage
📢 Announcements: the official instruction, and who has read it
This is the most important service in a crisis. Only administrators post, and under each announcement they see “Read by x/y”, so they know exactly who hasn't had the information yet. Announcements are sorted into pages (“Instructions”, “Situation update”, “Back to normal”) and can carry an attachment: a document, a photo, a voice message or a link.
💬 Chat: the backup team chat
Each team gets its own thread: messages, photos, voice messages, reactions and replies to a specific message. An administrator can restrict writing to administrators, which is handy for a crisis team that wants an information feed without the chatter. One-to-one and small-group conversations happen in Messages, outside the team thread.
📅 Calendar: situation updates
The 9am crisis call, the 2pm update, the lessons-learned review: each one is in the Calendar, everyone says whether they'll attend, and reminders go out automatically.
✅ Lists: the recovery to-do list
Get the PCs back up, contact priority customers, switch orders to manual processing… Lists works as a shared to-do list: tasks to tick off, each with a date, a reminder and a named person. Everyone can see what's done and what's left, and the list works even offline.
📁 Documents: the crisis folder, outside SharePoint
Business continuity plan, fallback procedures, on-call numbers, supplier contacts: these documents are only needed on the day of the outage, so they must never live solely in the tool that has gone down. Uploaded in advance to Documents, they can be read directly, without downloading.
🧩 And your own services, if you need them
Every business has its own way of working. On top of YouTim's services, other services can be built to measure and added to your instance, to fit your business continuity plan.
Prepare your plan B in five steps
- Install the instance on infrastructure that depends on neither Microsoft 365 nor Azure.
- Create the YouTims: one for the crisis team, one per team or site, plus an “Everyone” YouTim reserved for announcements.
- Invite staff in advance, by email, text message, link or QR code, and get them to install the app on their phone. On the day of the outage, Outlook won't be there to send the invitations.
- Upload your crisis documents and draft a few template announcements (“Outage in progress”, “Instructions”, “Back to normal”).
- Test it twice a year: a fifteen-minute exercise, one announcement sent, one “Read by” checked. A plan B that has never been tried isn't a plan B.
Depending on the nature of the outage, phone notifications may be disrupted too. Agree on one simple rule and write it into your business continuity plan: “If Teams stops responding, open YouTim.” Note down as well who activates the plan B and which announcement goes out first.
Why not just use WhatsApp?
WhatsApp is often the first reflex, and it helps in a pinch. But for a business it raises several questions: you need everyone's personal number, every member of a standard group can see everyone else's number, the company controls neither which groups are created nor when they're closed, and a messaging app offers no calendar, no to-do list, no document folder and no overall read receipt on an instruction.
A backup YouTim instance, prepared in advance, stays within the organisation's perimeter: its administrators manage participants and remove access when an employee leaves.
In the UK, the Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018 require operators of essential services to take appropriate and proportionate measures to prevent and minimise the impact of incidents, with a view to ensuring the continuity of their services. The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, introduced to Parliament in November 2025, would reform and add to these rules. If you also operate in the EU, the NIS2 Directive (Article 21) lists business continuity and crisis management among its risk-management measures, together with, where appropriate, secured emergency communication systems within the entity. Check with your IT security lead or legal adviser whether your organisation is in scope.
To find out more: YouTim installed in your organisation. For more information, email us at [email protected].
Frequently asked questions
What should we do when Teams and Outlook are down?
Switch to a backup channel prepared in advance and independent of Microsoft, and post a first official instruction there. Without a channel ready to go, staff improvise in personal groups that are hard to control.
What is a backup instance “on standby”?
It's a YouTim instance installed in your organisation, with accounts, groups and documents already in place but unused in normal times. It only comes into play when your main tool is unavailable.
Do staff sign in with their Microsoft account?
No, and that's deliberate: if the Microsoft sign-in is unavailable too, it mustn't block access to the plan B. Everyone signs in with their own YouTim credentials.
How do we know everyone has received the instruction?
With Announcements: the administrator sees “Read by x/y” under each announcement and can spot who hasn't read it yet.
What if the computers themselves are out of action?
The YouTim apps for iPhone and Android connect to your instance, so the phone becomes the backup workstation for reading announcements, talking in Chat and opening crisis documents.
Sources
- CNBC: Outlook and Microsoft 365 outage, 12 and 13 November 2026
- XDA Developers: live coverage of the Microsoft 365 outage (12–13 November 2026)
- Microsoft: “Helping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage” (20 July 2024)
- BleepingComputer: Microsoft 365 outage of 25 January 2023
- legislation.gov.uk: The Network and Information Systems Regulations 2018, regulation 10
- GOV.UK: Cyber Security and Resilience Bill
- Directive (EU) 2022/2555 (NIS2), Article 21