On Friday 13 November, a global outage at Microsoft knocked out Outlook and Teams for hours. SharePoint and related services went down too, and the disruption reached far beyond office inboxes. Hospitals and GP surgeries across the UK were all caught up in it. So were police forces and property agents. Email and other core IT facilities went dark for large parts of the working day.
For anyone buying, selling or letting a home in Norfolk or Suffolk this week, the story is worth understanding properly, not because it caused chaos locally, but because of what it reveals about how resilient, or otherwise, the home moving process really is when the technology underneath it stumbles.
The scale of the problem became clear fast. Outage tracker Downdetector said problem reports from Britain jumped tenfold at 5.43pm on Thursday, before many offices had closed. The outage was still widespread as Europe woke up on Friday, with Microsoft saying it had yet to see a sustained recovery. By the time most UK staff were logging on for the day, the problem was already well established.
Microsoft was quick to rule out anything more sinister than a technical fault. The company said this was a technical issue not related to cyber or AI / agents, and explained that the incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change. In other words, a routine piece of maintenance went wrong, not an attack.
That explanation will have reassured IT managers, but it did not change the practical reality for anyone relying on email that day, including the solicitors and lenders as well as the agents who keep property transactions moving.
Conveyancing is, at its heart, a relay race run largely by email. A completion depends on a string of confirmations passing between buyer’s solicitor, seller’s solicitor, lender and estate agent, and much of that traffic now runs through email. Take that away for several hours, even briefly. The risk is obvious: a signed-off mortgage release, a final search result or a redemption statement simply does not arrive when it is expected.
The stakes are not trivial either. Transactions already take months, and around one in three property sales fail to reach completion each year, according to government figures. Anything that adds friction to an already fragile process deserves attention, even when the fallout on the day turns out to be limited.
There was one piece of good fortune in the timing. Property portal analysis of Land Registry data stretching back to 1995 has consistently found that Friday 13 tends to be the quietest Friday for home moves, and that in general the 13th is the quietest day of the month for completions, with fewer home moves on average than on other dates. Fewer completions scheduled for that particular date meant fewer households nationally, and in this region, who were directly exposed to the worst of the outage on their actual moving day.
That is not the same as saying nothing was affected. Agents and conveyancers still had to manage client communications and file access as well as routine casework through a day when their usual tools were unreliable. But it does help explain why the disruption, while real, did not translate into a wave of collapsed completions.
The response from the industry was notably pragmatic. Ian Harris, president of NAEA Propertymark, which represents estate agents across the country, said: “good old-fashioned common sense, initiative and direct conversations have helped our teams work around the disruption.” He also pointed out that many agents, lenders and conveyancers use purpose-built online portals unaffected by the outage, although some people could experience delays while contingency communication methods were put in place.
That mirrors what agents were reporting on the ground. Jeremy Leaf, principal of a north London estate agency, said on the day: “So far we haven’t experienced a problem on a completion of a sale or letting today.” His advice to clients was straightforward: “As a contingency, we’re advising customers to try to use telephones or even communicate by hand where possible.” A spokesperson for one of the major property portals offered a similar picture, noting that its website was working as usual, adding that agents were working hard over the phone to help those home movers who were completing that day.
It is a useful reminder that, for all the digital infrastructure now built into buying and selling a home, the final stages of a transaction still depend on people picking up a phone and talking to one another. When the systems fail, that human layer is what keeps things moving.
For sellers and buyers across Norfolk and Suffolk, the practical takeaway is reassurance rather than alarm. Local completions due that day were not reported as having broken down because of the outage, and the wider pattern of Friday 13 being a naturally quiet day for moves meant the region, like the rest of the country, had fewer transactions than usual sitting in the firing line.
The episode is nonetheless a sensible prompt for anyone with a completion date approaching in the coming weeks. Keep direct phone numbers for your solicitor and lender as well as your agent close at hand, rather than relying solely on email threads. Ask your conveyancer what their contingency plan looks like if their systems go down on the day that matters most to you. None of this requires drama, just the kind of preparation that costs nothing and saves a great deal of stress if a similar issue recurs.
Microsoft has apologised for the disruption and said it would publish a fuller account once its review is complete. For the property industry, the episode is a reminder of how deeply embedded cloud services have become in a process that still, ultimately, depends on trust between people. Norfolk and Suffolk’s agents and conveyancers showed this week that when the technology falters, the fundamentals of good service and clear communication, along with a willingness to pick up the phone, still get the job done.
