On 23 July 2026 a major outage hit Microsoft 365, disrupting Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive, primarily for users routed through North America. Service was restored the same day, but for the hours it lasted, affected businesses could not reach their files, their chat or their documents.
The Uncomfortable Question
If your email, files and phone system all live with one provider, what exactly does your business do during a four-hour outage? For many small businesses the honest answer is "wait" — and that is a business continuity gap, not an IT detail.
Practical Continuity Steps
- Keep a local copy of what you need today. OneDrive and Drive both support making key folders available offline. Do it for the files you would actually need in the next 24 hours.
- Have a second communication channel. If Teams is your only contact route to staff, one outage silences the whole company. A phone tree or a second messaging app costs nothing.
- Do not host your status page with the provider that might be down. Customers need to reach you.
- Know where your backups are and whether restoring them depends on the same service being available.
- Write the plan down. One page. Who calls whom, what still works, what waits.
Is Switching Providers the Answer?
Google has been marketing directly at this, launching Business Continuity and Work Transformation plans aimed at organisations rethinking their reliance on Microsoft 365. It is worth understanding what that actually offers before treating it as a solution.
Our view: switching providers to escape outages mostly relocates the risk. Every large cloud provider has outages. Resilience comes from offline copies and a documented fallback, not from picking a different logo.
MediaVision Technical Analysis
The businesses that coped best in July were the ones where staff had recent local copies of active work. That is not an expensive capability — it is a configuration choice most companies simply never made.
We set up business continuity for small offices across Orange County, including offline file access, independent backup and a written fallback plan. It is an afternoon of work that pays for itself the first time something breaks.
