Are you ready for the next Microsoft outage?

3 days ago
3 min read

If you or someone you know tried to access SharePoint, OneDrive, Word, Excel, Outlook, Copilot or Teams recently and got a "Something went wrong" error message, you were not alone. The outage started at around 5am on July 24th and wrapped up at around 10am (HST), so for about 5 hours. It goes to show that just because you're using the Cloud, things still go down.

The problem is that most companies have spent the past decade moving everything to the cloud, not just email but file storage, accounting, and most all forms of communication including phone service. Covid accelerated this and now we're completely dependent not just on reliable Internet, but making sure that the companies that we depend on don't have a disruption.

Here are some recent, major outages that happened with cloud service providers in the US just this year that you may have already forgotten about:

Jan 22-23, Microsoft 365 (9hrs, 22mins), all Microsoft 365 services
Feb 20th, Cloudflare (6hrs), global outage for thousands of companies including Uber & Microsoft 365
Feb 27th, Google Cloud (1hr, 58mins)
May 7-8, Amazon Cloud (28 hrs), took down major sites like Coinbase
May 29-30, Microsoft Azure (22hrs), made Azure VM's inaccessible

The Takeaway

Microsoft advised customers in an interim status update to “review their business continuity and disaster recovery plans and take actions appropriate for their environment.” That's great advice and brings up a great question - when was the last time you looked at your business continuity (BC) or disaster recovery (DR) plan?

Now don't panic, I know that some of you reading this might not have heard these terms before. A business continuity or BC plan is a written document that explains how your organization will continue functioning during a major disruption such as a cyber attack, power outage, severe weather emergency or major technology failure. A disaster recovery or DR plan is a related document that lays out how you will restore your systems, information, and get operations back to normal afterward.

I know what you're thinking - yes ChatGPT or any other AI engine can help with writing one up but ultimately, it has to be true to your company. If you don't have one yet, there are some resources available to help you get started:

CISA - Incident Response Plan Basics
A concise, non-technical guide explaining what an incident response plan should contain and how it should be used before, during and after an incident. Go to the CISA IRP Basics guide
FEMA Ready.gov - Business Impact Analysis Worksheet
Helps identify which operations are most critical, how long they can be unavailable and what resources are required to restore them. Download the Business Impact Analysis Worksheet
FEMA Ready.gov - Business Continuity Plan Template
A practical fill-in document covering critical business functions, recovery strategies, communications, employees, facilities, suppliers and IT recovery. Download the Ready.gov Business Continuity Plan