Microsoft 365 has had a rough 2026, and if your team has noticed Teams, Outlook or SharePoint acting up more often this year, it's not just you. On 23 July 2026, a faulty maintenance change stripped too many network routes out of Microsoft's Azure West US region, and for several hours it took Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook and the Microsoft 365 admin centre down or degraded for organisations connecting through North America — with knock-on effects reported well beyond it. It followed a string of earlier 2026 incidents affecting the same core services. When it happens again — and on current form, it will — the businesses that keep working aren't the ones with a bigger IT budget, they're the ones with a plan for the ten minutes after the outage starts.
Why this keeps happening
Microsoft 365 is not one product, it's dozens of interdependent services — identity (Entra ID), Exchange Online, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive — sharing common infrastructure like authentication and networking. That's normally a strength: one login gets you into everything. During an outage, it's the opposite. Microsoft's own post-incident summary for the July event attributed it to a bug in a maintenance-request conversion process that removed more network routes than intended in one region, and because so many services sit on shared networking and identity layers, a single regional fault surfaced as failed sign-ins, stalled Teams chats, broken automation flows and slow admin access all at once — even for services that don't obviously depend on each other.
For a Perth business, the practical effect is the same regardless of the root cause: staff can't sign in, can't see email, can't join a call, and can't tell if it's their internet, their laptop, or Microsoft. That uncertainty costs more time than the outage itself.
The real problem: most businesses have no fallback
A managed IT provider can't stop Microsoft's cloud from going down — nobody can promise that, and be wary of anyone who does. What a good IT partner can do is make sure an outage on Microsoft's end doesn't also take your business down. Most SMBs we see have never actually tested what happens when Microsoft 365 is unreachable, because until 2026 it rarely came up. That's changed.
1. Have a status page bookmarked, not a guess
Before troubleshooting your own network, check the Microsoft 365 Service Health status page (or the public Azure status page) if you can reach it, or a third-party tracker like Downdetector. Knowing within two minutes that it's Microsoft, not your firewall or your ISP, stops staff — and your IT provider — wasting an hour chasing the wrong fault.
2. Keep an out-of-band way to reach your team
If Teams and Outlook are both down, how does your office tell everyone "we know, we're on it, here's what to do"? A simple WhatsApp or SMS group with key staff, or a phone tree for critical roles, costs nothing to set up and is the single most useful thing we recommend after every outage debrief. Don't rely on the same platform that's down to announce that it's down.
3. Keep critical files available offline
OneDrive and SharePoint sync a local copy of files marked "Always keep on this device" — files set to "Files On-Demand" only download when opened, which is exactly what fails during an outage. For documents your team needs minute-to-minute (current contracts, price lists, forms), make sure they're pinned to sync locally rather than cloud-only. We cover the setup in our guide to using OneDrive backup to secure your files with Microsoft 365.
4. Don't confuse a Microsoft outage with your own tenant issue
A platform-wide outage looks similar to a tenant-specific fault at first — email stops arriving either way — but the fix is completely different. If it's Microsoft's infrastructure, there's nothing to "repair," you wait it out and work around it. If it's your tenant (a DNS record, a mail flow rule, a compromised account), it needs active diagnosis. We've written up how we work through that second scenario in how we diagnose and restore a sudden Microsoft 365 email outage — worth a read so your team can tell the two apart quickly.
5. Treat backup and continuity as separate from "Microsoft handles it"
Microsoft's shared-responsibility model covers platform uptime and infrastructure resilience, not your data retention or your business continuity plan. An outage is temporary and (almost always) recoverable on Microsoft's end; a deleted mailbox, a ransomware event, or a misconfigured retention policy is a different risk entirely, and Microsoft's native retention tools are not a substitute for independent backup. If your business hasn't reviewed its backup and disaster recovery position since moving to the cloud, an outage is a good, low-stakes prompt to do it — before a higher-stakes event forces the question.
What we'd actually recommend doing this week
You don't need to build an elaborate disaster recovery plan to get most of the benefit. Realistically:
Bookmark the Microsoft 365 status page on a device that isn't dependent on Microsoft 365 to load it (your phone's browser, not a pinned Teams tab).
Set up one fallback communication channel (SMS group, WhatsApp, or even a shared personal email) that every staff member already has access to.
Confirm your two or three most business-critical documents sync locally rather than cloud-only.
Write the above down in one page and share it with the team — the value is entirely in people knowing the plan exists before they need it.
None of this prevents Microsoft's next outage. It just means your Perth office keeps functioning through the next one instead of losing a morning to it. If you'd rather have this built and tested properly as part of an ongoing managed IT services arrangement — including a real backup and continuity review — get in touch and we'll walk through what your business actually needs.
