Since Thursday, millions of Outlook and Teams users have been refreshing a dead inbox. Microsoft has confirmed a worldwide outage affecting its messaging services, ruled out a cyberattack, and reported gradual improvements, according to French national coverage by franceinfo, Le Monde and Ouest-France. In the United Kingdom, the incident is one of the most searched topics of the moment under the query “microsoft outage today”, with users checking the “microsoft outage status” and the “microsoft outage news” pages before starting their working day. For readers who work with France — a French subsidiary, French clients, a French employer, a case before a French court — the practical question is immediate: an email sent from London to Paris during the outage, a one-time code that never arrived, a deadline missed because the mailbox was frozen. This article answers under French law, which governs the employment contract performed in France, the consumer contract of the French user, and the evidence assessed by a French judge. The French écrit électronique (electronic writing) has the same probative force as paper, but only under conditions. The force majeure (unforeseeable and irresistible event) excuses some delays and none of the others. And a paid Microsoft 365 subscription is a continuous digital service subject to conformity duties. The facts below follow the press reports of 13 and 14 November 2026; the legal analysis follows the statutes and court decisions in force on 14 November 2026, each linked to its official source.
I. Microsoft outage today: is an Outlook email sent or received during the outage still valid proof before a French judge?
Yes, if it satisfies the two statutory conditions of identification and integrity. An email that cannot be attributed to its sender, or whose content cannot be shown to be intact, is not an écrit (writing) in the eyes of a French court, whether or not Microsoft was down that day. The outage changes the evidence you can produce, not the rule itself. Readers who search “microsoft outage today” generally want to know whether their frozen mailbox destroys their file. It does not, provided they understand the rule and keep the right traces from today.
A. “My email left my outbox late, or never arrived”: electronic writing keeps its force only if the sender is identified and the message is intact
French civil law states the rule in one sentence: “L’écrit électronique a la même force probante que l’écrit sur support papier, sous réserve que puisse être dûment identifiée la personne dont il émane et qu’il soit établi et conservé dans des conditions de nature à en garantir l’intégrité.” In English: electronic writing has the same probative force as paper writing, provided the person from whom it emanates can be duly identified and it is drawn up and stored in conditions capable of guaranteeing its integrity. Two conditions, both cumulative: identified sender, guaranteed integrity. A judgment of the Reims Court of Appeal of 17 March 2026 (case no. 25/00557, decision published on the Cour de cassation portal) applies exactly this provision to an electronically signed loan contract, recalling the same two conditions before examining the file. The Paris Court of Appeal confirmed the same approach on 24 September 2026 in a dispute between a bank and a borrower over an electronically signed personal loan (case no. 25/15561, decision published on the Cour de cassation portal): the lower court had rejected the bank’s claim because the signature was not a qualified electronic signature, and the appellate court examined whether the bank proved a reliable identification process linking the signatory to the deed.
Concretely, during this week’s outage, three situations must be distinguished. First, the email you sent before Thursday and stored on your own server or in your sent items with full headers is unaffected: the sender is identified by the account, the integrity follows from the stored copy, and the outage that came later changes nothing. Second, the email stuck in your outbox or delayed by Microsoft’s servers on Thursday or Friday still exists as an electronic writing, but its date and delivery become harder to prove: keep the outbox timestamp, the non-delivery or delayed-delivery notice, the Microsoft service-health notice, and any acknowledgment your correspondent sends once service resumes. Third, the email your correspondent claims never to have received raises the general burden-of-proof rule: “Celui qui réclame l’exécution d’une obligation doit la prouver.” In English: whoever claims performance of an obligation must prove it. And “Réciproquement, celui qui se prétend libéré doit justifier le paiement ou le fait qui a produit l’extinction de son obligation.” In English: conversely, whoever claims to be discharged must establish payment or the fact that extinguished the obligation. If you claim you sent the notice, the termination letter, or the acceptance on time, you prove sending and, where the contract requires it, receipt. A screenshot of an unsent draft proves nothing; a sent-items record with headers, a server log, or the recipient’s reply proves the sending. Where the contract or the statute requires a particular form — registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt for a dismissal, a withdrawal, or a termination — an ordinary email was already insufficient before the outage, and it remains insufficient during it.
Practical checklist for today: note the exact hours your mailbox was unusable, save the Microsoft service-health notice and the press reports dated 13 and 14 November 2026, export the sent-items headers of every important message, keep any delayed-delivery or non-delivery notice, and ask each key correspondent to confirm in return what they received and when. These five items cost minutes to gather and decide, months later, whether your file proves sending, delivery, or nothing at all.
For cross-Channel correspondence, one practical reflex matters more than any other. Do not resend five contradictory versions of the same message while the service stutters. Each new version creates a new writing with a new timestamp, and a French judge faced with three inconsistent emails will retain the one most favourable to the other party or discard all three as unreliable. Send once, keep the sending trace, and if the message is important — notice, acceptance, reservation, complaint — duplicate it the same day through a channel that the outage does not control: the recipient’s non-Microsoft address, a registered letter, or a bailiff’s electronic service where the stakes justify it. The outage is a fact you document; it is not a substitute for the form your contract required.
B. “The verification code never arrived, the signature link expired”: who proves the electronic signature when the mailbox is down?
French law defines the signature by its function, not by its technology: “La signature nécessaire à la perfection d’un acte juridique identifie son auteur.” In English: the signature required to perfect a legal act identifies its author. And “Lorsqu’elle est électronique, elle consiste en l’usage d’un procédé fiable d’identification garantissant son lien avec l’acte auquel elle s’attache.” In English: where it is electronic, it consists in the use of a reliable identification process guaranteeing its link with the deed to which it relates. Reliability is presumed only for the qualified electronic signature created under conditions fixed by decree; for every other process — a simple click, a code received by email, a link opened from an inbox — the party relying on the signature proves the reliability of its process. That is the whole lesson of the Paris loan decision of 24 September 2026 cited above: the bank that relied on a non-qualified signature had to prove the reliable process, and the first judge rejected the claim because that proof was missing. The Reims decision of 17 March 2026 (Reims Court of Appeal, no. 25/00557) repeats the same statutory test before ruling on the merits.
Applied to this week’s outage, the consequence is direct. If your counterparty signed by clicking a link sent to an Outlook address that was unreachable on Thursday, the signature is not automatically void, but the party invoking it must show that the signatory is still duly identified and the deed intact. A one-time code sent to a dead mailbox and validated from another device may satisfy the test; a link opened by whoever had access to a shared or forwarded inbox may not. If you are the party collecting signatures — an employer gathering signed amendments, a company closing a sale, a landlord regularising a lease — suspend time-sensitive signature campaigns that depend on Outlook delivery until Microsoft confirms restoration, or switch the delivery channel to addresses outside the affected infrastructure and record that switch in writing. If you are the party asked to sign urgently during the outage, sign on a channel you control, keep the full chain (invitation, code request, code receipt with timestamps, signed document), and confirm acceptance by a second message once the mailbox recovers. A signature collected in chaos and documented nowhere is the file the other side will attack first, outage or not.
One warning closes this part. The outage does not create a right to repudiate a signature given before Thursday. A borrower who signed electronically on Wednesday through a reliable process cannot claim on Friday that the signature is void because Outlook failed on Thursday. The Metz Court of Appeal examined exactly this type of defence — a borrower claiming a third party used his email address to sign electronically — in its judgment of 29 April 2026 (case no. 24/02162, decision published on the Cour de cassation portal), and the answer turned on the evidence of the complaint and the payment history, not on the mere assertion of mailbox misuse. Assertions do not replace proof; during an outage, documented traces replace assertions.
II. Missed deadline, lost working day, paid subscription frozen: who bears the Microsoft outage under French law?
Three different losses, three different answers. A missed contractual or procedural deadline is assessed under force majeure, and the bar is high. A lost working day is assessed under employment law, and the employer that chose the tool generally bears the risk. A frozen paid subscription is assessed under the conformity regime for continuous digital services and European data-protection duties, and the supplier owes restoration, and sometimes a price reduction. Readers searching “microsoft outage status” want restoration times; readers who work with France also need to know which loss they can shift and which loss stays with them.
A. “Can the outage excuse my missed deadline or my day without email?”: force majeure is narrow, employment risk stays with the employer
The statutory definition leaves no room for impression: “Il y a force majeure en matière contractuelle lorsqu’un événement échappant au contrôle du débiteur, qui ne pouvait être raisonnablement prévu lors de la conclusion du contrat et dont les effets ne peuvent être évités par des mesures appropriées, empêche l’exécution de son obligation par le débiteur.” In English: force majeure in contract matters exists where an event beyond the debtor’s control, which could not reasonably have been foreseen when the contract was concluded and whose effects cannot be avoided by appropriate measures, prevents the debtor from performing. Three cumulative conditions — beyond control, unforeseeable, unavoidable — plus a causal fact: the event must have prevented performance. And the sanction for unjustified non-performance follows: “Le débiteur est condamné, s’il y a lieu, au paiement de dommages et intérêts soit à raison de l’inexécution de l’obligation, soit à raison du retard dans l’exécution, s’il ne justifie pas que l’exécution a été empêchée par la force majeure.” In English: the debtor is ordered, where appropriate, to pay damages for non-performance or delay, unless he establishes that performance was prevented by force majeure. The burden lies on the debtor who invokes it. A recent illustration comes from the Poitiers judicial court on 28 May 2026 (case no. 25/02161, decision published on the Cour de cassation portal), which recalled that the training provider that failed to deliver the promised service had to prove either delivery or force majeure within the meaning of article 1218, and examined its evidence accordingly. A telecom-provider dispute decided by the Chambéry commercial court on 11 June 2025 (case no. 2024F00247, decision published on the Cour de cassation portal) shows the mirror image from the supplier’s side: the customer argued that a month-long line failure was a manifest breach of an essential obligation and that the supplier proved neither force majeure nor any third-party act nor any extraneous cause within the meaning of article 1231-1. The method is the same on both sides: whoever invokes the outage proves it, precisely.
For a contractual deadline — deliver the file, notify the termination, exercise the option — a two-day global messaging outage can constitute force majeure only if you show all three conditions in your file. Beyond your control: yes for an ordinary user facing a worldwide Microsoft failure, no for the IT provider that contractually guaranteed continuity. Unforeseeable: a worldwide outage of this scale is generally unforeseeable for an ordinary contracting party. Unavoidable in its effects: this is where most invocations fail. If you had a second channel — another messaging provider, a registered letter, a filing portal — and you waited for Outlook to return instead of using it, the effects were avoidable and force majeure is lost. Document the outage window with the Microsoft status page and the press reports, list the alternative channels you tried with timestamps, and perform as soon as restoration allows. If the impediment was only temporary, the statute suspends the obligation rather than ending it, unless the resulting delay justifies termination.
For procedural deadlines before French courts, the warning is stricter. Time limits for appeal, opposition, or administrative recourse (recours, the legal challenge) run from statutory texts and court rules, and French courts accept very few excuses for missing them. The decisions consulted for this article do not establish any general rule suspending procedural time limits during a private messaging outage, and this article states no such rule. If a filing deadline falls on Thursday or Friday, file through the official channel — the court’s filing portal or the bailiff — and never treat an unsent email as a filing. Mention the outage in your cover message as a fact, attach the status-page evidence, and let the judge decide; do not assume the deadline moved.
For employees, the analysis reverses. Telework (télétravail, remote work) is defined by statute as work that could also have been performed on the employer’s premises and is performed outside them voluntarily using information and communication technologies, and the collective agreement or employer charter organises its conditions: article L1222-9 of the Labour Code sets this framework and refers to the applicable agreement or charter for the conditions of passage to telework and return. In English: the employer that organises work around Outlook and Teams chose the tool and generally bears the tool’s failure. An employee who stays available, attempts connection, reports the blockage promptly, and performs offline tasks cannot have wages withheld for hours the employer’s own infrastructure made unproductive. Conversely, the employee who simply disappears for two days without notice cannot later dress the absence as an outage. Employers with staff in France should issue one written instruction today: report the blockage, log attempted connections, switch to the backup channel, and record offline work. That single note will decide more wage disputes than any later legal argument.
B. “Can I get a refund or compensation for Microsoft 365?”: continuous digital service, conformity duties, and data-security obligations
French consumer law treats a Microsoft 365 subscription as what it is: a digital service supplied continuously, not a box bought once. The statute defines the consumer’s digital environment as “tout matériel informatique, logiciel et connexion réseau utilisés par le consommateur pour accéder à un contenu numérique ou à un service numérique ou en faire usage” — in English: all computer hardware, software and network connections used by the consumer to access or use digital content or a digital service. And it provides: “Lorsque le contrat prévoit que le contenu numérique ou le service numérique est fourni de manière continue, le professionnel répond des défauts de conformité qui apparaissent au cours de la période durant laquelle celui-ci est fourni en vertu du contrat.” In English: where the contract provides for continuous supply, the trader answers for lack of conformity appearing during the period of supply. The detailed conformity criteria follow in article L224-25-14 of the Consumer Code, including fitness for the usual purpose of a service of that type. A worldwide messaging blackout lasting from Thursday into Friday is, on its face, a lack of conformity of a continuous service: professional email that cannot send or receive is not fit for its usual purpose. The consumer remedies under this regime include bringing the service into conformity, and where that fails, a price reduction or termination, under the conditions those provisions state.
Two practical consequences follow for French and France-linked users. First, paying consumers — and small businesses that qualify under the protective provisions their contract designates — should notify Microsoft through the account channel now, describing the failure window, the account, and the loss of use, and keep the ticket number. A claim filed months later without a contemporaneous notice is weaker than a notice filed today. Second, businesses should read their service-level agreement before promising anything to their own clients: many enterprise contracts convert downtime into service credits rather than damages, cap liability, and exclude consequential loss.
What to put in that notice: the account and subscription reference, the failure window with timestamps, the services affected (mail, calendar, authentication codes), the number of users blocked on the French side, and the concrete consequences already visible (messages delayed, signature links expired, meetings missed). Ask expressly for restoration, for written confirmation of the incident window, and for the application of any service-credit clause. A short, factual, same-day notice preserves every later option; a long complaint sent three weeks later, without timestamps, preserves none.
Those clauses are enforceable between professionals unless a specific protective rule or an unfair-terms finding displaces them, which no decision consulted for this article establishes for this outage. Do not promise your clients that Microsoft will pay for their losses; check the credit clause, claim the credit, and manage your own liability separately.
Conclusion
A global Outlook and Teams outage does not suspend French law; it tests it. Emails keep their probative force where the sender is identified and the message intact, and lose it where neither can be shown. Signatures collected through a dead mailbox bind where the identification process was reliable, and wobble where it was not. Deadlines survive the outage unless the three conditions of force majeure are documented together, and procedural deadlines survive it entirely unless the competent judge decides otherwise. Employers absorb the unproductive hours of staff who stayed available; employees who vanished do not. Subscribers to a continuous digital service can invoke lack of conformity and claim restoration, credit, or price consequences under their contract, while data controllers log the incident and notify only where a personal-data breach is characterised. For the British reader working with France, the method for this week is short: keep the sending traces, duplicate important messages outside the affected infrastructure, perform late obligations at restoration, notify the supplier today, and write down what the outage prevented, hour by hour. The mailbox will recover; the file, if documented now, will hold.