You sent out a Microsoft Form and people are telling you it says ‘This form is currently not accepting responses’, or that the form is closed. Or you're the one trying to fill it in, and there's no way past that screen.
Several different things stop a Microsoft Form taking answers: the Accept responses setting, a start or end date, a setting (yours or your admin's) that only lets people in your organisation respond, an automatic block for suspected phishing, or a form owner whose account has been removed. The fix depends on which one it is. Everything below comes from Microsoft Support and Microsoft Learn.
Tell which case you're in
Match what you see to the likely cause:
- Everyone gets the ‘not accepting responses’ message, even people in your organisation: check Accept responses and the start and end dates in the form's Settings.
- It worked until a certain day, or hasn't started working yet: an End date has passed or the Start date is still in the future.
- People outside your organisation are asked to sign in or can't get in, while colleagues can: the form is restricted to your organisation, or your admin has turned off external responses.
- The form asks for passwords or other sensitive details, or your IT team received a Forms phishing alert: it may have been blocked for potential phishing.
- Nobody can change the form because the person who made it has left: it needs an admin transfer.
Cause 1: Accept responses is turned off
This is the switch that closes a form on purpose. Sign in at forms.office.com, open the form, and select Settings. Under the options for responses, make sure Accept responses is ticked.
When you untick Accept responses, Microsoft Forms shows an empty text box where you can write your own message for people who open the form. That's useful when you close a form deliberately, for example ‘Registration has closed, email us instead’. If people are seeing your custom message, this is the setting that closed it.
Cause 2: the start or end date
In the same Settings panel, Start date and End date set the window of time when you'll accept submissions. You can choose a date and a specific hour from a drop-down of hour increments. Both are optional: if you don't set them, Microsoft says people can submit responses for any duration.
If the start date is later than you meant, or the end date has passed, the form won't take responses. Clear the dates, or move them so today falls inside the window, then check that Accept responses is still ticked.
Cause 3: only people in your organisation can respond
Select Collect responses on the form to choose who can respond. The two organisation-only options need respondents signed in with a work or school account, and they're only available for Office 365 Education and Microsoft 365 Apps for business users. If people outside your organisation need to fill in the form, switch it to Anyone can respond. The three options, in Microsoft's words:
- Anyone can respond: anyone inside or outside your organisation with the link. Microsoft notes these responses don't require someone to sign in.
- Only people in my organization can respond: members of your organisation can respond, but others can't, even if they're given the link.
- Specific people in my organization can respond: only the people or groups you name (up to 100 names, including up to 20 groups).
Cause 4: your admin turned off responses from outside the organisation
If Anyone can respond isn't available to you, your Microsoft 365 admin may have switched off external sharing for Forms. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, the admin goes to Settings, then Org settings, then the Services tab, and selects Microsoft Forms. Under External sharing there are four options, all checked by default. The one that matters here is ‘Send a link to the form and collect responses’, which covers sending a form to people outside your organisation and collecting their responses. The admin ticks it and selects Save changes. These admin settings exist only for Office 365 Education and Microsoft 365 Apps for business customers.
Cause 5: the form was blocked for potential phishing
Microsoft Forms runs automated reviews to detect forms collecting sensitive data, such as passwords, and temporarily blocks those forms from collecting responses. If nobody acts, the form stays blocked, but the owner can still edit it and remove the wording that was flagged.
A global or security administrator can review blocked forms in the Microsoft Defender portal under Incidents & alerts, then Alerts, and choose Unblock if the form is genuine. Microsoft tells admins to ask for the form's title and the date and time of the block, so have those ready when you ask for an unblock. Microsoft can also block a user who has repeatedly tried to collect sensitive information from sharing forms at all; an admin can lift that from the Message center, and Microsoft says it may take 30 minutes or more before the restriction is removed.
Cause 6: the form's owner left the organisation
Only a form's owner can change its settings, and you can't take over a form someone shared with you. When the owner has left, an office application administrator with a valid Forms licence can transfer the form, as long as the owner's account has been deleted or disabled. A disabled account has no time limit. A deleted account must be handled within 30 days, because Microsoft deletes all account-related data 30 days after a user is deleted from your tenant. Forms from a hard-deleted account can't be transferred and aren't recoverable.
Microsoft's steps for the admin:
- In the browser's address bar, go to https://forms.cloud.microsoft/Pages/delegatepage.aspx?originalowner= followed by the former owner's email address. If the email address returns nothing, Microsoft suggests using the user's Object ID instead.
- On the form you want, select More form actions, then Move, and move it to a Microsoft 365 group the new owner belongs to. You need to be a member of that group to do this, and you can leave it afterwards.
- If you see ‘We can't access this page’ with a note that the owner still has an active account, the transfer won't work while that account and Forms licence are active.
- After a move, the original link keeps working as long as the original owner's account still exists; once that account is hard deleted, the original link stops working, so share the group form's link instead.
Response limits
Microsoft Forms does cap responses, but the business limit is high. According to Microsoft Support, at the time of writing a form or quiz can receive up to 5,000,000 responses on business and education accounts, up to 50,000 on GCC High and DoD, up to 200 on free personal Microsoft accounts (Hotmail, Live, Outlook.com) and up to 1,000 on paid personal accounts. Above 50,000 responses, summary charts and viewing individual responses aren't supported, though export still works.
Microsoft doesn't describe what respondents see when a form reaches its cap. Its suggestion for collecting more is to export the responses to Excel and then clear them from the form, which lets it collect more.
If you're the person filling in the form
If the form says it isn't accepting responses, only the owner can reopen it, so let them know. If it asks you to sign in, the form is limited to an organisation: sign in with the work or school account that organisation gave you, not a personal one. If you don't have one, ask the owner to switch the form to Anyone can respond.
Avoid this next time
For forms a team relies on, create them as group forms or move them into a Microsoft 365 group, so they don't depend on one person's account. If your form is for customers or the public rather than colleagues, OneSol is another option: it gives you a free page with one link for all your profiles and forms that don't make people sign in.