What the Microsoft 365 outage means for your online forms

What happened in the Microsoft 365 outage

Microsoft 365 began having problems on the evening of Thursday 12th November, UK time, and by the next morning people around the world were struggling to get into their email in Outlook, their calendars and Teams. Microsoft's own notice says the features that interact with Exchange Online, the service behind Microsoft 365 email, have been affected across a long list of its services, while the parts that don't depend on Exchange have kept working.

At the time of writing, on 13th November 2026, the outage hasn't been fully resolved. Microsoft says it's seeing recovery across the affected regions, including much of Europe, though some users may still have intermittent problems or delayed email while recovery continues. It says it has no evidence of malicious activity, and that it will publish a full Post-Incident Report with the root cause once the problem is fixed.

Why online forms stopped working

For members of the public, one of the most noticeable effects was on online forms. Hertfordshire Police warned that some online form submissions may be affected, and Dorset Police said it was unable to receive online form submissions. Both asked anyone with something time-critical that wasn't an emergency to call 101 instead. South Wales, Dyfed-Powys, Sussex and Kent Police also reported problems with reports made through their websites.

It wasn't only the police. Most NHS trusts in Surrey, Sussex and Kent reported problems sending and receiving emails, and some said patient enquiries and referral correspondence were affected. Patients were asked to phone instead, and trusts said appointments and procedures were going ahead as usual.

Councils were hit too. Brighton & Hove City Council and East Sussex County Council asked residents to call, and Kent County Council warned that "other systems that rely on emails being sent may also be affected, including those on our website and offered by our contact centre".

Most didn't say how their forms are set up, but Kent County Council's warning points to a common arrangement. A form on a website often works by handing each submission on to something else, usually an email to a shared inbox, and sometimes an automated flow that files it in a spreadsheet or a case system. The form can load and look perfectly normal, but if the service it hands submissions to is down, nothing reaches the people who need to act on them.

Microsoft Forms itself isn't on Microsoft's list of affected services. A form built with it that sends each response on by email, or into an automated flow that depends on Exchange Online, relies on the part of Microsoft 365 that has been affected, and plenty of organisations, membership bodies and federations among them, run applications and referrals that way.

Building a form that keeps working through an outage

Every online service has the odd outage, and none of this is a reason to stop using Microsoft 365 for email and documents. It is worth making sure, though, that a form people rely on doesn't depend on a single service to do its job.

For applications, referrals and any other form where a lost submission would cause trouble, we make sure the first thing the form does with a submission is save it in the system's own database, before any email is sent or anything is passed to another service. If the email is held up or another system is down, the submission is still safe, and your team can see it in the system while they wait.

Beyond that, the safeguards depend on what the form is for and what it connects to. We can have a failed email or hand-off retried automatically until it goes through, send it by a second route through a backup provider when the main one is down, or fall back to a simpler way of working when an outside service doesn't respond. On a Harrogate garage's enquiry form we built, a customer types in their registration and the vehicle's make, model, colour, fuel type, engine size and year are filled in from the DVSA's MOT History API. If that service is ever unavailable, the form lets them type the details in themselves.

One of the forms we've built, a membership organisation's online application for new members, has kept taking applications all through this outage. It's an important form: applicants sign on screen and make their insurance choices, and anyone opting into a health insurance scheme has the provider's own form filled in and sent to them automatically. It runs on our own servers rather than inside Microsoft 365, and every application is saved in the system before any email goes out.

Moving from Microsoft Forms to a custom form

We've moved clients off Microsoft Forms onto custom forms before. A custom form does only what your process needs and follows the steps your team already works to. It can show each person only the questions that apply to them, check answers as they're entered, take a signature on screen, produce a signed PDF and send each submission wherever it needs to go, including into Microsoft 365 if that's where your team works.

Forms we build in PHP and MySQL run on our servers in Tier 3 data centres in London and Manchester, behind Cloudflare. You'll find more about the systems we build on our Web Development page, about connecting them to other platforms on Integrations & AI, and about our work with public sector and membership organisations on our Public Sector page.

How we can help

If your organisation relies on a form for membership applications, referrals, bookings or reports from the public, we can look at what it depends on and tell you where it could fail. If it makes sense to rebuild it as a custom form, with whichever safeguards suit the job it does, we'll quote a fixed price before we start.