Microsoft vs Google: five years of outages, stacked side by side

By Tihan van der Walt | 13 November 2026

The year was about 2019, before Covid took over our logic and our governments shut down our businesses for good. I was waiting on a call with a multinational TV broadcaster, waiting on their brief to rebuild their vast website. Then came the WhatsApp: please dial into our Teams meeting. I cringed for a moment. "Teams? As in Microsoft," I thought to myself. I didn't realise after years of Outlook torture we would put ourselves through more. Yet here we are.

I quickly downloaded the app on my phone and set it up as a guest and joined the call. What an inconvenience, I thought.

So, before you think I am biased, I am a Google tech. I assist businesses all over the world with using Google to their advantage. Google is what we grew up with, what we know is the most stable. It too has meeting functionality. It's got everything we need, yet here we are, on Teams.

Fast forward a few years later, I opened a small studio in Johannesburg as a sideline business, and here is my business partner onboarding clients through Microsoft. My simple question was, would we really want to reinvent the wheel? We had experienced great difficulty with some clients who just couldn't access their drives and meetings on time, and decided to go with Google.

Disclaimer: I'm not sponsored or paid by Google, but I am a practical businessman. Let's use the road of least resistance. So here are the facts, stacked side by side, in light of the current Microsoft failure.

What happened this week

If Outlook wouldn't open for you this morning, I already wrote that up earlier today in a separate post: what's broken, what still works and what Microsoft has actually said.

Long story short, CIO reported that "the outage began at 16:17 UTC on Nov. 12, according to Microsoft's service health dashboard," which is 18:17 our time. At 19:54 SAST the status account started talking about Exchange mailbox problems, and at that stage it was only the Americas. Thirteen minutes later the story changed, and the issue "may affect Microsoft 365 connectivity for users in any region." So, there you have it, that's the one that reached us. Microsoft's own dashboard wording, as CIO quoted it: "Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed."

Downdetector South Africa, as I noted in that earlier post, logged 874 Microsoft 365 reports at 07:53 on Friday, and 744 for Outlook at 07:38. MyBroadband opened its story with "Companies in South Africa were paralysed on Friday", and reported that "several JSE-listed South African companies, including fintech Lesaka Technologies and insurance provider Momentum Group, were affected by the outage." Medical aid Bestmed had to tell its customers their email was down. One MyBroadband reader said: "Outlook is down for us at work, which is our main connection to our overseas suppliers, so we can't communicate with them or our customers." The City of Cape Town put out a notice of its own, telling residents that "these issues are related to Microsoft's global infrastructure and are not linked to your devices or network connectivity."

Ordinary Teams chats and calls were largely still working. MyBroadband put it like this: "The core functionality of Teams, including joining calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages, was not impacted." Features that lean on Outlook were not so lucky, and a lot of people simply couldn't get into their mail. On the cause, Microsoft said that "the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure," and that it was "not aware of any malicious activity that is causing this incident." In other words, no hackers (for now). There is no final report yet. In Friday's reporting, recovery was moving, but the service was not fully back to baseline, already well past 18 hours.

A bad week is not five years, though. I went back through official reports and reputable news, from November 2021 to now, and only kept what I could verify.

The biggest outages

I got picky about this list, and for good reason. Microsoft and Google both post a lot of small advisories on their status pages, Microsoft more so, and if I counted each and every one of them I could make either company look like a disaster. That's not what a business owner needs to know. An outage only made my list if a business would actually feel it, and if I could check for myself how long it lasted and what caused it.

Two footnotes though, before you scroll …

The first is CrowdStrike, 19 July 2024. Microsoft's own blog was quick to point out that "this was not a Microsoft incident", and went on to say: "We currently estimate that CrowdStrike's update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines." Microsoft 365 on those machines was useless until the boxes came back to life, sure, but the fault sat with CrowdStrike's update, so it isn't in the table.

The second one is older. On 14 December 2020 Google's sign-in went down worldwide for 47 minutes, and people still bring it up. Seeing that it falls just outside the five years I looked at, it stays down here with the footnotes.

What the official numbers say

Microsoft at least publishes a quarterly figure. If you go to Microsoft Learn, you will find a table of its worldwide uptime going back to 2022. In 2022 and 2023 every quarter was either 99.98 or 99.99. In Q4 2024 it was 99.927. In Q1 2026 it was 99.526, the only quarter in the whole table that falls under 99.9, and in Q2 2026 it was 99.994 again.

The Office 365 for IT Pros team has been noting these numbers since 2013, and they explain it better than I can: "The 99.526% figure published for Microsoft 365 uptime in the first quarter of the 2026 calendar year came as a real surprise because it was such a big drop over the performance delivered in the previous quarters." And: "Delivering 99.526% uptime means that service interruptions clocked up approximately 614 minutes (just over ten hours) in the quarter. Not only was the figure well below the norm (performance in Q4 CY2025 was 99.954%), but it also marked the lowest figure for uptime performance since the Office 365 for IT Pros team began to track the data in 2013."

Google doesn't publish a quarterly table, and just like Microsoft's numbers (which, like Google’s, are their own numbers and not independently audited), Google's figure is Google's own: a Workspace blog post on 16 October 2025 said that "so far in 2025, Workspace has had a 99.99% uptime," unaudited, up to mid-October 2025, and nothing on the rest of 2025 or 2026, in a post pitching Workspace to Microsoft customers. Both companies sell a 99.9% monthly target, Microsoft per service, per tenant, per month, and Google with downtime counted only when its web interface "has more than a five percent user error rate," according to the Workspace SLA.

The Office 365 for IT Pros people are careful to add that "A large drop in uptime performance in Q1 might seem staggering, but it is only an indicator that one or more largescale incidents occurred, perhaps in several regions. Certainly, the impact of the incidents was sufficient to materially affect the global uptime metric." So it does not mean that every customer was offline for ten hours.

A fair look

Seeing that I use Google (I said so in the first paragraph), it would be cheap of me to just say "Google wins". The public record of those major incidents does give Microsoft the heavier list, though, with more of them and several longer ones, in January 2023, November 2024, October 2025, January 2026 and this week, which was past 18 hours in Friday's reporting. And it isn't always Outlook on its own. A shared layer goes, and the rest goes with it.

This week was a good example. According to MyBroadband, "The core functionality of Teams, including joining calls, meetings, group chats and channel messages, was not impacted. However, Teams services that depended on Exchange Online were experiencing calendar-related failures, including issues with scheduling, sending invites, viewing, and editing meetings."

Google is not outage-free, though. The worst one I could verify is 12 June 2025, three hours, global, Workspace plus a huge slice of Google Cloud. Google's incident report explains it like this: "On June 12, 2025 at ~10:45am PDT, a policy change was inserted into the regional Spanner tables that Service Control uses for policies. Given the global nature of quota management, this metadata was replicated globally within seconds. This policy data contained unintended blank fields." It also says, "This incident should not have happened." The 17 June 2024 one lasted longer on the clock, six hours and 40 minutes, but a lot of it was partial. Google's report on that one says "Google Meet : Impacted users sparsely experienced latency or failures while joining scheduled meetings over a period of 4 hours," and that Docs users "encountered the error "Name loading" in comments or other areas where authors' names were expected."

On the flip side, Microsoft publishes many more small admin-centre incidents than Google. So, if you only count outages, Microsoft will almost always look worse, and seeing that it has a much larger enterprise footprint, more companies feel it when it fails and it hits the news harder. That amplifies an outage. It doesn't invent one. The June 2023 DDoS attacks and the July 2024 CrowdStrike update hurt Microsoft customers but were not Microsoft 365 faults in the same way as a bad rollout, so they are not in the table. Microsoft's own service description says that "Interruptions caused by third party service providers, or changes made within customer managed environment, aren't considered service incidents."

Last but not least, Reddit. After this week's outage there was a thread on r/Office365 from a company whose leadership had apparently promised to leave Microsoft. I'm not reading too much into it. One post is colour, not data, and it's no evidence that a migration actually happened.

What this means for a South African business

"It is just a matter of not being able to communicate via normal channels, and obviously anything important from clients won't be received until everything is working again." That was one MyBroadband reader on Friday. Another said: "My staff will still be able to do other tasks, but I don't know if that will fill their day up." MyBroadband also reported that "there were attempts within their company to find other methods of communicating with clients, such as WhatsApp and Gmail. Google has been floated as an alternative."

Still, I'm not going to tell you to tear Microsoft 365 out on Monday. We went with Google for that little Johannesburg studio because some clients simply couldn't get into their drives and meetings on time, and that's our story. A full migration of mail, files, meetings and the way a whole company works is a project that takes time and money, and you can break things on the way.

What I would do, Microsoft or Google, is plan for the next outage now, not during it: a WhatsApp group, a cellphone list and a short note for the website. Email still carries the invoices, job offers, meeting links and the "please find attached" here, and fibre or a backup LTE SIM won't help if the mailbox itself is down. David Stinner, president of US itek in Buffalo, New York, told CRN after the January outage: "In the past our phones would have lit up and our after-hours calls to the OnCall techs would have been crazy just because people would be in the dark about the outage."

Unfashionable, I know, until a Friday like this one. The City of Cape Town had its note up on Friday: "These issues are related to Microsoft's global infrastructure and are not linked to your devices or network connectivity. Our IT teams are monitoring Microsoft's updates while assessing the impact on our environment."

If you're already on Google, don't get smug, because 12 June 2025 should have sorted that out. Google had fewer platform-wide failures in this window, and generally shorter ones, and that's all I'm prepared to say. It is not "Google never goes down." If you're on Microsoft and you want a backup, Workspace can sit next to it. Google's own blog post says its Business Continuity plan "runs Google Workspace in parallel with Microsoft 365; it's designed for Microsoft customers that want to ensure continuity of operations. During an outage, teams can continue working with secure and compliant apps, such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, and the Gemini app, without the need for migration."

Need a hand with Google?

Some owners enjoy this kind of digging. Most, I'd guess, would rather someone else did it.

MinuteSteak (Linbro Park, Sandton; by appointment only) is one of the big players in South African digital marketing. Google setup and support is work we do: Google Workspace, Google Ads, Google Business Profiles, and the websites those tools point to. WhatsApp 081 327 2146, or hey@minutesteak.co.za. Appointment only, no walk-ins.