This week Microsoft 365 had one of its biggest outages of the year. For a lot of businesses, email stopped and stayed stopped into a second day. Nothing was lost. It was still a good moment for an awkward question: when the cloud is closed, what can you actually get to?
In short
An outage stops you reaching your data. It does not delete it. It does show you who is holding it.
Owning your data does not mean leaving the cloud. It means having a copy that does not depend on one company.
Three things carry a studio through a day like this: a separate backup, a way to work offline and a second way to reach people.
What happened
Late on Thursday in London, early on Friday in Melbourne, Outlook and Exchange Online began failing for businesses around the world. Teams calendars, SharePoint and Copilot were caught up in it. Reports of Outlook problems on Downdetector passed 100,000.
Microsoft said a number of its servers had become unexpectedly unavailable and the rest could not carry the load. Its first fixes did not hold. It has said there is no sign of an attack, and it has promised a full report. Until that report arrives, anybody telling you the exact cause is guessing.
Lost access is not lost data
Your mailboxes and files were there the whole time. Most email sent to you during an outage is not lost either: the sender's system keeps trying and it arrives late, in a rush, slightly out of order.
So the lesson is not that the cloud is unsafe. Microsoft runs email better than any studio could run it in a cupboard. The lesson is narrower and more useful. For many hours, the only copy of your working life sat somewhere you could not reach, and you had no say in when it came back.
Renting and owning
With Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace you are a tenant. It is a good building with a good landlord, most of the time. Owning your data means three things a tenant does not get by default.
A copy outside. A separate backup of every mailbox and shared drive, held away from the provider, that can be restored without asking them. Microsoft's own terms recommend that customers keep one.
An exit route. Your data in a form you could take somewhere else. You should know how you would move it and roughly how long it would take.
A way to keep working. The files for this week's deadline available offline on the laptop. A phone list that does not live in Outlook. A second channel, agreed in advance, for when email is down.
Are people really pulling out of the cloud?
At the big end, some are. In a Broadcom survey of 1,800 IT leaders this year, half said they had already moved some of their work back from the public cloud, mostly because of cost.
Hardly anybody leaves entirely, and for a studio of twenty, running your own email server would be a step backwards. The sensible version is smaller. Keep the cloud for what it is good at. Hold your own copy of what matters.
What that looked like on Friday
For the studios whose Microsoft 365 we back up, every mailbox and shared drive had been copied the night before, to our own secure storage outside Microsoft's cloud. If someone needed an email or a file from before the outage, we could pull it out of the backup while Outlook was still spinning.
That is the whole idea. Not a bunker. A second copy, and somebody who can get into it.
Want a copy that is yours?
We back up Microsoft 365 for studios every night, keep earlier versions, and restore an email, a folder or a whole mailbox when you ask. If you are on Google Workspace, the same thinking applies. Talk to us, or read about backup and disaster recovery.