When Microsoft 365 goes down, what do you do?
Outlook and OneDrive outages this month were caused by DDoS attacks. Your plan for a cloud outage can fit on one page.
Early this month Outlook, OneDrive and the Azure portal had outages. Microsoft has now said they were caused by DDoS attacks. Even the biggest platforms go down sometimes, and on that day nobody in your company can email, open files or join calls.
You can’t fix Microsoft’s outage. You can decide in advance what your team does during one.
One page is enough:
- How do we talk? A backup channel that isn’t Microsoft: a WhatsApp or Signal group, or a phone tree. Set it up before you need it.
- Where do we check status? The provider’s status page and its admin centre, bookmarked.
- What must keep working? Usually a few things: customer calls, payments, deliveries. Know how to do those by hand for a day.
- Who tells customers, and what do they say?
- Offline copies of the few files you can’t work without: contacts, contracts, price lists.
Cloud services are very reliable. Very reliable still means a bad day now and then.