Why was Outlook down yesterday?

1 day ago

3 min read

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard about the global Microsoft outage that stopped companies in their tracks. The reason? Software update? Cyberattack? Aliens? We just don’t have a clear answer, they’re blaming it on a component failure cascade. Updates have been coming in on X and the Microsoft Service Health status page, but the notices have been pretty vague.

The Microsoft cloud ecosystem relies on thousands of datacenters around the world, running countless interconnected and interdependent applications and services. The whole thing more closely resembles a Rube Golberg contraption than an enterprise that powers a good portion of our economy, especially here on the islands. We’ve had Microsoft outages lasting hours back in January and February but this one has been the longest yet.

The Takeaway

I did an interview on KHON2 yesterday which really focused on what we can do in our businesses to continue serving our clients and community when outages like this occur. Let’s face it, we’re on an island. Power, internet and cloud disruptions are becoming more frequent every year. The time be unprepared has passed.

During the last major outage in February, 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?

If you don’t have one, you’re in good company. Here’s the step-by-step to get started:

Step 1: Open a blank Word document (if your Microsoft 365 is working!)

Step 2: Copy/paste the following questions into your document:

1) What are the most important ways that we communicate with our clients?

2) What are the most critical technologies we use to perform the work our clients depend on us for?

3) Which vendors do we depend on that would affect our business if they were unavailable?

Step 3: Bring your team together and answer those 3 questions.

Step 4: For each item you listed, write underneath what you would do if that resource were unavailable.

For example:

The most important way we communicate with our clients is by phone and email.

If our office phones are down, our calls can be forwarded to Sandy’s cell phone.
If our email is having problems, we have already a Slack channel set up to communicate with our most important clients. We can also use text messaging and we have the cell phone numbers of our clients’ points of contact so we can keep in touch.

This way, when the next outage occurs, you have a simple, one-page playbook anyone at your company can read and know what to do.

I think disaster planning can get real complicated, real fast, which is why many companies don’t do it and then shoot from the hip when something goes down. This simple four-step method should at least give you something to work from when the next outage happens… which could be sooner than you think.

Stay safe out there.

-Attila