In the first week of June 2026, Microsoft 365 went down twice. First Office for the web and Teams stopped opening files, then Exchange Online stopped delivering email across three continents. As an Austin MSP serving businesses across Central Texas, CTTS spent that week answering the same question from owners and executives: when the cloud stops, how do we keep working?
What Is at Stake
On June 1, Microsoft confirmed a widespread outage it tracked as MO1329446. Users across the world could not open files in Office for the web or Teams for several hours. Before most companies had finished cleaning up from that disruption, a second incident began. Starting June 2, Exchange Online incident EX1331830 blocked email delivery across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, and as of June 3 Microsoft had still not announced a resolution or a root cause.
Think about what those two incidents mean for a typical Central Texas company with 25 to 250 employees. Email is how your quotes go out, how your invoices arrive, and how your customers reach you. Teams is where your project conversations live. SharePoint and OneDrive hold the files your staff need to do their jobs. When those services stop, your team does not stop costing you money. Payroll deadlines do not move. Customers do not wait patiently. A single afternoon of idle staff and missed communication can quietly erase the margin on a week of work.
There is a second, less obvious risk hiding behind the outage conversation. Microsoft promises uptime, not data protection. Under the shared responsibility model that Microsoft documents publicly, Microsoft is responsible for keeping the service running, while you are responsible for protecting your own data. A service credit for missed uptime does not bring back a deleted mailbox or a corrupted document library.
Why Central Texas Businesses Face This Challenge
Central Texas companies have moved to the cloud faster than almost anyone. Growing firms from New Braunfels manufacturers to Round Rock professional services practices have standardized on Microsoft 365 because it works, it scales, and it lets lean teams compete with much larger companies. That is the right move. But it also concentrates risk. When everything from email to file storage to phone meetings runs through one platform, one outage touches every part of the business at once.
Most local companies also run lean on internal IT. A 50 person firm rarely has someone on staff whose job is to map dependencies, design fallback plans, and test recovery procedures. So when an outage hits, the response is improvised. People text each other asking if it is just them. Someone checks social media to see if Microsoft is down. An hour goes by before anyone makes a decision, and nobody is sure which work can continue and which cannot.
The companies that handled the June outages well were not lucky. They had simply decided, in advance, what they would do when the cloud went quiet. That preparation is what separates a minor inconvenience from a lost day.
How an Austin MSP Helps You Build Outage Resilience
This is the work an experienced Austin MSP does before anything breaks. At CTTS, outage resilience starts with a dependency map: a clear picture of which business processes rely on which cloud services, so you know in minutes, not hours, what an incident actually affects.
From there we build the layers that keep you productive. We set up independent backup of your Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, stored outside Microsoft's environment so it is reachable even when the platform is not. We establish communication fallbacks so your team and your customers are never unreachable. We monitor Microsoft service health directly, which means we often know about an incident before your staff notice symptoms, and we can tell you whether the problem is Microsoft, your network, or your configuration.
Just as important, we put it all in writing as part of your business continuity plan, and we rehearse it. Central Texas businesses trust CTTS because we reduce their risk and help them keep more of their money, and few things protect both like being the company that keeps operating while competitors sit idle.
Five Practices That Keep You Productive During a Cloud Outage
Know your dependency map before you need it
Most owners can name the big services their business uses. Far fewer can say which specific processes break when one of them fails. A dependency map connects the dots: order intake depends on email, scheduling depends on Teams, contract review depends on SharePoint. It takes a few hours to build and it transforms outage response from guesswork into a checklist.
The map also reveals concentration risk you may not know you have. If your phone system, your file storage, and your customer communication all sit behind the same login, that is one password, one tenant, and one outage away from a full stop. Seeing it on paper is usually all it takes to justify a fallback.
Build a communications fallback plan
The most painful part of the June Exchange Online incident was silence. Companies could not send email and could not tell customers why. A simple fallback plan fixes this: an alternate channel for internal coordination, a way to post a status note to customers, and a short list of who communicates what.
The fallback does not need to be elaborate. A group text list for leadership, a phone tree for client facing staff, and a prewritten message that says you are experiencing a vendor outage and remain reachable by phone will carry you through most incidents. The key is writing it down before you need it, because an outage is the worst possible time to invent a process.
Back up Microsoft 365 data independently
Outages end, but data loss is forever, and the two risks are related more often than owners expect. Microsoft's native retention windows are short: deleted email is held for a limited time, and SharePoint recycle bins eventually purge for good. Microsoft states plainly in its service documentation that customers should plan their own data protection. You can review the details in Microsoft's service health and continuity documentation.
An independent, third party backup of your tenant gives you two things at once. It protects you from accidental deletion, malicious insiders, and ransomware that reaches synced files. And during an extended outage, it gives you a second copy of critical documents your team can actually reach. For most businesses this costs a few dollars per user per month, which is a rounding error next to one lost day.
Plan around offline access for critical files
Cloud first does not have to mean cloud only. For a small set of truly critical documents, such as price lists, active contracts, and operational checklists, configure selective offline sync so current copies live on the laptops of the people who need them. When the June file opening outage hit, teams with offline copies kept working in desktop apps while everyone else stared at loading screens.
This deserves judgment, not a blanket policy. Syncing everything to every device creates its own security problems. The right approach identifies the dozen files each role cannot work without and makes sure those, and only those, are available offline. This is exactly the kind of decision your managed IT services partner should be making with you.
Rehearse the outage before it happens
A continuity plan that has never been tested is a theory. Once or twice a year, run a short tabletop exercise: announce a pretend Microsoft 365 outage on a Tuesday morning and walk through the response. Who notices first? Who declares the fallback? Can the team in your Georgetown office actually reach the offline files? Does the prewritten customer message still have the right phone number on it?
These exercises take an hour and they surface the gaps that would otherwise cost you a day. They also build calm. A team that has rehearsed an outage treats the real thing as a procedure, not an emergency, and that composure is visible to your customers.
Take the Next Step
The June 2026 outages were a free warning shot. Microsoft will keep improving its platform, but no cloud service will ever be perfect, and the businesses that thrive are the ones that plan for imperfection. If you are not certain how your company would handle two days of disrupted email, that uncertainty is fixable, and a conversation with an Austin MSP that lives this work every day costs far less than finding out the hard way.
CTTS offers a free strategy session for Central Texas business owners who want a clear eyed look at their outage resilience and business continuity planning. We will walk through your dependencies, your backup posture, and your fallback plans, and you will leave with specific next steps whether you work with us or not.
Schedule your free strategy session with CTTS today!
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Microsoft back up my Microsoft 365 data?
No, not in the way most business owners assume. Microsoft operates under a shared responsibility model: it keeps the service running and secures its infrastructure, but protecting your data is your job. Native retention windows are short, and once they pass, deleted email and files are gone for good. An independent third party backup of Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams is the accepted best practice for businesses of every size.
What should my business do during a Microsoft 365 outage?
First, confirm it is actually Microsoft and not your own network, which your IT partner can verify through the service health dashboard. Then activate your communication fallback so leadership can coordinate and customers know you are reachable by phone. Shift staff to work that does not depend on the affected services, using offline copies of critical files where you have them. Finally, log what the outage affected so you can tighten your plan afterward.
How often does Microsoft 365 go down?
Microsoft 365 is reliable overall and Microsoft backs it with a 99.9 percent uptime commitment, but incidents are a normal part of any cloud platform. June 2026 alone saw two significant disruptions in the first week, including a multi day Exchange Online email incident. The practical takeaway is to treat outages as a matter of when, not if, and to build a plan so a few hours of vendor downtime does not become a lost day for your business.
Contact CTTS today for IT support and managed services in Austin, TX. Let us handle your IT so you can focus on growing your business. Visit CTTSonline.com or call us at (512) 388-5559 to get started!