From a backup channel to payroll priorities, here's how HR teams can keep staff informed, scheduled and paid during a disruption
A Microsoft outage that began Thursday stretched into a second day Friday, leaving employers in dozens of countries with unreliable email, calendars and some Teams features. Microsoft said server problems, not a cyberattack, caused the disruption, and by Friday morning it was reporting "encouraging recovery progress."
Meanwhile, HR teams have to reach employees without the channel they usually depend on, and the place to start is one clear backup channel.
"In a disruption, silence is creating anxiety," Anna Tavis, clinical professor and chair of the Human Capital Management Department at New York University's School of Professional Studies in New York, told HRD America. "A message that says 'no change, next update at 3 p.m.' is important communication."
What happened in the Microsoft outage
The disruption began at 11:17 a.m. U.S. Eastern time, according to Microsoft incident logs republished by the University of Pennsylvania's Microsoft incident reports page. Microsoft said the failure centered on Exchange Online, the cloud email and scheduling service behind its Microsoft 365 workplace suite, and on features that depend on it, including its Copilot AI assistant. The company said a large number of servers became unexpectedly unavailable, shifting load onto the rest of its infrastructure.
By about 8 a.m. Eastern time Friday, Microsoft described broader improvements in North America, sustained gains across much of Europe and early signs of recovery in Asia Pacific, though some users still faced intermittent problems or delayed email.
Around 1 p.m. Eastern time Friday, Microsoft said in a post on X that it had addressed the underlying issue and was restoring service to the remaining customers and regions, CNN reported.
How HR can keep people connected
Microsoft's service health page said core Teams functions, including calls, meetings and channel messages, weren't affected, though calendar scheduling and other features that depend on Exchange Online were, NBC News reported. That means HR can't count on a Teams invitation or an email reply having arrived.
Tavis said HR teams should settle on one option and make sure everyone knows about it.
"HR should pick a single fallback channel, such as SMS, a phone line, or a simple status page, and announce it," she said. "Post updates at regular times even when there's nothing new to report."
Next, Tavis said, HR teams should triage by who's most exposed, and payroll comes first.
"Payroll comes first because it's a legal obligation, not just a workflow," she said. "Nobody should get paid late because an inbox was down."
Shift schedules come next, she said, because hourly workers' income depends on them.
"Confirm shifts by phone or text, and treat any shift that was published before the outage as valid," she added.
Candidates and new hires come after that, Tavis said, because they have the hardest time finding out what's happening.
"Call them. Pushing an interview back is fine," she said. "For a new hire's first day, keep it in person if at all possible, even if logins have to wait."
What the outage means for continuity planning
The outage has revived questions about reliance on a handful of technology providers.
"The bigger worry is that this isn't the first 365 outage this year," said Josh Gilbert, a market analyst at trading platform eToro, according to Reuters. He said repeated failures could give IT departments a reason to hesitate before putting even more of their business with a single provider.
Ciaran Martin, former head of the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre and now a professor at the University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government, told NBC News the incident "looks like being one of the biggest outages of all time," though he said it was too early to be sure.
Those concerns echo the ones raised after the July 2024 global IT outage, when HRD America reported that an academic urged employers to overhaul their cybersecurity strategies. The same questions now face the senior leaders profiled in HRD America's Global 100 report on the top HR executives and leaders in the world, who are already navigating a range of challenges.
Tavis said business continuity plans have long covered buildings and data centers but rarely reach everyday HR operations such as approvals, scheduling and recruitment.
"The lesson isn't to get rid of platforms," she said, noting that employers must make sure their most essential obligations to people, including paying, scheduling and welcoming them, have a backup that someone is responsible for.
"Resilience is a question of who bears the cost when the technology fails," she added, "and too often it's the people with the least power in the system."
Microsoft has said only that its post-incident report will follow once recovery is complete.
