What happens to emails sent during outage as Microsoft introduces 48-hour safeguard

Millennials be like, "I really needed this," and it's just Microsoft Outlook being down. While it's business as usual for many of us on November 13, some are kicking back and calling an early weekend amid the excuse of not being able to access their emails.

The news never stops at UNILADTech, and although some companies have ground to a halt, we're here on the front lines to report what's going on.

Having already covered how everything from Teams to Outlook have been ravaged by a November 12 outage, Microsoft claims things are slowly returning to normal. But, what about that important Friday email from your boss, asking you to work over the weekend?

What will happen to Outlook emails sent during the Microsoft outage?

Some might assume that an inability to send emails during the outage just means you won't be able to reply to the Secret Santa or RSVP to Sharon's baby shower, but as several law enforcement agencies have highlighted, there's massive disruption to email and essential communication platforms. Citizens are directed to look for updates on official websites and advised to phone instead of sending emails for emergencies and non-emergencies alike.

Many people will still be sending emails during this period, but will they be lost?

Instead of emails being lost, they tend to arrive late, at a time when Outlook is operating as it should.

Mail servers will retry when a recipient can't be reached, while Microsoft's own site clarifies that Exchange Online will keep trying to deliver emails for 24 hours.

At this point, it will notify a sender that an email can't be sent, meaning you should get a bounce-back if any of your outgoing mail doesn't get to where it's supposed to.

Microsoft has confirmed that services aren't yet back to normal, clarifying that recovery efforts continue on impacted infrastructure with "early signs of stabilization." As service capacity hasn't returned to its usual levels, the tech giant is keeping an eye on things as traffic is carefully introduced.

You can only imagine how an influx of everyone suddenly trying to use Outlook again could overload servers.

At the time of writing, Microsoft reiterated that its "primary mitigation path continues to focus on service stability and controlled recovery."

What is Microsoft's email safeguard?

With Microsoft trying to regain control of the situation, it has confirmed that the usual email timeout window of 24 hours has been extended to 48 hours in an attempt to protect delayed messages. Engineers are said to be "cycling affected infrastructure through traffic drain, restart, remediation, and staged return-to-service," suggesting that when your mailbox server reconnects, you'll get your delayed emails in batches instead of one big deluge.

The 48-hour buffer should let engineers throttle and release all the queued messages in a controlled manner while ensuring the infrastructure can handle them.

We're currently 16 hours out from the first reports of an Outlook outage, so extending to 48 hours also gives engineers a little more breathing room to restart affected servers and clear the massive backlog of emails before any are rejected.

The issue is, holding emails for an extended period of time exhausts the server storage and memory capacity of Microsoft data centers, so it's not simply a case of just infinitely extending the window for days or weeks.

Also, an inability to send an email should trigger a Non-Delivery Report so senders can try to find alternative ways to contact whoever they'd been reaching out to. During this extended period, that won’t happen.

What not to do during the Outlook email outage

In terms of what you shouldn't do right now, avoid trying to rewrite and send the same email multiple times because you think the original hasn't been sent. This will only put a strain on servers and lead to duplicated messages once normal service resumes.

You're also advised not to try typical troubleshooting like clearing your cache, resetting passwords, or reinstalling Outlook. As the fault is entirely on Microsoft's back-end servers, you risk causing yourself further problems.

Finally, Outlook users are reminded to look out for scams because cybercriminals will often use major outages like this to deploy fake IT-support calls and ask for fraudulent payment requests when emails are down.

To keep up with where everything is, you're encouraged to check the Microsoft Service Health Status page or follow Microsoft 365 Status on X.