How to Keep Your New York Business Running When Microsoft 365 Goes Down

Most of your business runs in the cloud at this point — email, files, accounting, bookings, payments. Then one day a service goes down, and suddenly nobody can send an email, open a file, or take a payment.

It doesn’t take a hacker for this to happen. In July 2024, a faulty update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide within hours. Microsoft put the number at around 8.5 million devices, grounding flights and stopping work at banks and hospitals nationwide. Nobody hacked anyone. It was just a bad update.

Outages happen, even to the biggest names

Microsoft 365 itself has had its own stretches where email or Teams stopped working for hours. Internet providers have bad days too, and when yours does, everything online goes down with it. Any tool your business depends on can fail — being with a well-known, established provider doesn’t make you immune.

So much of a small business now runs on a handful of online services that when one of them goes down, the work depending on it simply stops until it’s back.

What an outage actually does to a business

When a key service goes down, your team can’t reach email or files, so work stalls out. If your payment or booking system is offline, you can’t take money or appointments. Customers try reaching you and can’t — and you can’t reach them either. Staff end up sitting around, waiting.

You usually can’t fix it yourself. When a major provider has an outage, all you can really do is wait it out. That’s the whole point of a plan: it’s not about fixing the outage, it’s about staying operational and keeping customers informed until it resolves.

What a solid plan should cover

A good plan answers a handful of questions. Which tools are genuinely critical? List the few services that would actually halt the business if they went down — email, your payment system, your booking tool — and skip the ones you could live without for a day.

How will people stay in touch? You need a backup way to reach staff and customers that doesn’t depend on the tool currently down — phone numbers, a group chat on a different platform, or plain texts.

What needs to be reachable offline? Keep a copy of the essentials — your customer contact list, key phone numbers, important documents — somewhere you can open even when the main system is unreachable. A printout or a phone-saved copy is enough.

Who’s actually in charge during an outage, and who’s updating customers? Decided in advance, this turns confusion into action.

Where do you check, and who do you call? Know where to see if it’s a wider outage — typically the provider’s status page — and who to call for help, which for most small businesses is their IT provider.

What to do the moment it hits

Check whether it’s just you by looking at the provider’s status page or asking around. If it’s a wider outage, there’s nothing to fix on your end, so stop trying to. Tell your team what’s down and what to use instead, so nobody wastes an hour rebooting a laptop that was never the problem. Switch to your backup communication method. Tell affected customers and give them a sense of when to try again. Note when it started and what was affected — a couple lines is enough to help with a follow-up once things are back.

A few things that make outages hurt less

Keep key files available offline — with OneDrive or SharePoint, recent files can sync to a device so people can still open them while the service is down; your IT provider can confirm this is configured. Have a backup way online, like a mobile hotspot, that can get a handful of key people working again if the main connection drops. Bookmark the status pages for Microsoft 365 and your other core tools — the fastest way to tell whether the problem is theirs or yours. Keep contacts off the cloud entirely, whether that’s a printout or your phone’s own address book. And ask about proactive alerts that flag an outage before your customers do — something we set up for a lot of our hospitality clients, where a booking-system outage means lost revenue by the hour.

Keep the plan to one page

Keep it to a single page, somewhere reachable without your main systems — printed, or in a separate app. List your critical tools, your backup way to communicate, where the essentials live, who’s in charge, and who to call. Review it once or twice a year so the names and numbers stay current — a plan listing a former employee’s cell number isn’t much help at 4pm on a bad Thursday. Businesses running our business continuity planning already build this into their setup, so it isn’t something they’re scrambling to write from scratch mid-outage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t the cloud always available?
No. Cloud services are reliable most of the time, but even the biggest providers have outages — the CrowdStrike incident took millions of computers offline within hours. It’s safer to plan for an eventual outage than assume it won’t happen.

What should a continuity plan actually include?
The basics: which tools are critical, a backup way to reach staff and customers, where essential information lives offline, who’s in charge during an outage, and who to call for help. One page covers it for most small businesses.

What if the internet itself goes down, not just one app?
Plan for that too. A mobile hotspot can get key people back online, and a phone call still works when your systems don’t. Keep important numbers somewhere that doesn’t require internet access.

How can my team keep working if Microsoft 365 is down?
Depends on the work, but options include files already synced to a device, switching to phone or text to coordinate, and handling anything urgent on paper until service returns.

How long do outages typically last?
No fixed answer — some resolve in minutes, others take most of a day. That unpredictability is exactly why you plan around them instead of counting on a quick fix.

Whose job is this to set up?
Yours, with help from your IT provider. They can flag which of your tools carry the most risk, set up synced files and status-page alerts, and help you put the one-page plan together.

Prepared by the EB Solution team — business continuity and managed IT services for businesses across the New York area. Don’t have a one-page plan yet? Talk to our team and we’ll help you build one.