The morning the cloud went out
It happened — January & July 2026The Register, 23 Jan 2026
On 22 January 2026 Microsoft 365 went down hard — Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneDrive disrupted for nearly ten hours. On 23 July it happened again, for about five, after a maintenance bug deleted network routes. Nobody's password was phished. Nobody clicked anything.
Your version starts at 9:20 on a Thursday, when Teams won't load and neither will the files. The next ninety minutes go on the worst possible activity: rebooting laptops, resetting the router, changing passwords one by one — treating Microsoft's outage as your fault. One password reset done mid-outage on a locked account can cost an afternoon after the cloud comes back. The firms that lost the least that morning simply knew, fast, that it wasn't them.
This is you if All-in on Teams, with no agreed fallback channel; nobody knows where service health is even checked; an outage morning turns into everyone's IT project.
How we run it
Ten minutes to a verdict: it's you, or it's them.
We check the provider's own health feeds and what our other clients are seeing — when two firms ring at once, it's upstream. You get a plain answer: “It's Microsoft, it's global, stop rebooting things.”
We stop the self-inflicted damage.
No password resets, no settings changes, no panic-installing alternatives mid-incident. The most valuable sentence of the morning is the one that prevents improvised harm.
The agreed fallback carries the morning.
Phones still work. The channel you chose calmly in advance — a text tree, a call bridge — takes over, and the files that sync locally keep people working.
And one honest update an hour.
What the provider says, what we can see, what to expect — so nobody burns the morning refreshing a status page.
Made boring by: the one-page outage drill written at onboarding, plus the ten-minute verdict when it happens. Nobody can prevent a Microsoft outage — anyone who implies otherwise is selling something. What you're buying is knowing fast and wasting nothing. Included in every plan
Real outages: The Register / BleepingComputer, 2026. The ten-person firm is illustrative.