What happens to RFQ quoting when Outlook goes down?

When Outlook goes down, your traders lose the window they work in. The mailbox behind it does not always go down with it. During the Microsoft 365 outage of 12 November 2026, aersyn.ai still reached my clients’ mailboxes through Microsoft Graph: auto-quotes on stock kept going out and traders kept reading and answering requests from the app, with a few failures. The rest was triage: AOG deals first, then a phone call to check the buyer got the quote.

What actually stops when Outlook goes down?

On Thursday 12 November 2026, around noon in New York and 6 pm in Paris, Microsoft 365 went down in many countries. Outlook was hit the hardest, with Teams and Copilot too. The next morning, Microsoft’s status page still showed “Service degradation” and said that users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.

For an aircraft parts trader, that is the whole working day. The RFQs, the supplier offers and the POs all arrive in Outlook. From that moment, my clients could not get into their mail.

The status page talks about users who cannot connect. The Outlook app is one way into the mailbox. Software can use another one.

How can software keep working when the Outlook app does not?

For the trader, aersyn.ai lives inside Outlook. But aersyn.ai itself reaches the mailbox through Microsoft Graph, the interface Microsoft provides so that software can read and send mail. During the outage of 12 November, that connection kept working at my clients while their traders could not open their mail.

So two things kept running. Auto-quotes on stock went out, for the clients who have switched them on. Buyers who do not use Outlook received them as usual. Buyers on Outlook received them too and read them when Outlook came back.

The aersyn.ai app could also still read the mailbox. From it, my clients managed their deals, their orders and even order revisions. They read and sent their emails from the app, with a few failures on Microsoft’s side at times.

Does that mean your desk is safe from the next outage?

No. It depends on what fails. On 12 November, people could not connect but the mail service behind Outlook still answered software requests, most of the time. If the mail service itself stops, software that depends on it stops too, until Microsoft brings it back.

What keeps running is also limited to what you set up before. Auto-quote only sends if you enabled it. It only sends on your own stock.

Sourcing, prices on parts you do not hold and every quote that commits your company stay with your trader, outage or not. That is the human in the loop. An outage does not change it.

What should your traders do during the outage?

Here is what I told each of my clients on 12 November:

1. See the requests in the app, since that is where they still are.
2. Put the urgent AOG deals first. An aircraft on the ground does not wait for Microsoft.
3. Call the buyer directly to check that they received your quote.

The call is there because a buyer on Outlook may only see your quote when their Outlook comes back. During an outage, you cannot assume that a sent quote was read. A short call tells you where the deal stands today.

What should you ask your quoting vendor before the next outage?

Four questions, before you need the answers:

1. Does your system reach our mailbox through the Outlook app or through Microsoft Graph?
2. What kept working at your clients during the last Microsoft outage? What did not?
3. Which quotes go out on their own? Who decided that?
4. Who contacts us when it happens?

The last one is not technical. On 12 November, I contacted each of my clients during the outage to talk about what it meant for them, what aersyn.ai could do in the meantime and how to keep doing business without their main tool.

aersyn.ai works on the Microsoft 365 tenant you already own, with access that is delegated, logged and revocable. Your IT can check the details on the security page. To see what your trader finds in Outlook on a normal day, follow the product tour.