How to Keep Your Toronto Business Running When Microsoft 365 Goes Down

Most of your business probably runs in the cloud at this point — email, files, accounting, bookings, payments. Then one day a service goes down, and suddenly nobody can send an email, open a file, or take a payment.

It doesn’t take a hacker for this to happen. In July 2024, a faulty update from the security company CrowdStrike crashed millions of Windows computers worldwide in a matter of hours. Microsoft estimated roughly 8.5 million devices were affected, grounding flights and stopping work at banks and hospitals. Nobody hacked anyone. It was just a bad update.

Outages happen, even to the big names

Microsoft 365 itself has had its own days where email or Teams stopped working for hours at a stretch. Internet providers have bad days too, and when yours does, everything online goes with it. Any tool your business depends on can go down — being with a well-known, established provider doesn’t make you immune.

So much of a Toronto small business now runs on a handful of online services that when one goes down, the work depending on it simply stops until it’s back.

What an outage actually does to a small business

When a key service goes down, your team can’t reach email or files, so the work stops. If your payment or booking system is offline, you can’t take money or appointments. Customers try to reach you and can’t — and you can’t reach them either. Staff end up sitting around, waiting.

You usually can’t fix it yourself. When a major provider has an outage, all you can really do is wait for them to sort it out. That’s exactly why a plan matters: the goal isn’t fixing the outage, it’s staying operational and keeping customers informed until it’s resolved.

What a simple plan should cover

A solid plan answers a handful of questions. Which tools are actually critical? List the handful of services that would genuinely halt the business if they went down — email, your payment system, your booking tool — and ignore the ones you could live without for a day.

How will people keep in touch? You need a backup way to reach staff and customers that doesn’t depend on the tool that’s currently down — phone numbers, a group chat on a different platform, or plain text messages.

What needs to be reachable offline? Keep a copy of the essentials — your customer contact list, key phone numbers, important documents — somewhere you can open even if the main system is unreachable. A printout or a copy saved to a phone is enough.

Who’s actually in charge during an outage, and who’s updating customers? When that’s decided in advance, people act instead of waiting to be told what to do.

Where do you check, and who do you call? Know where to see whether it’s a wider outage — usually the provider’s own status page — and who to call for help, which for most Toronto businesses is their IT provider.

What to do the moment it hits

Check whether it’s just you, by looking at the provider’s status page or asking around. If it’s a wider outage, there’s genuinely nothing to fix on your end, so stop trying. Tell your team what’s down and what to use instead, so nobody burns an hour rebooting a laptop that was never the problem. Switch to your backup way of communicating. Tell customers if it affects them — bookings, payments — and give them a sense of when to try again. Note when it started and what was affected; a couple of lines is enough to help you follow up once things are back.

A few things that make outages sting less

Keep key files available offline — with OneDrive or SharePoint, recent files can sync to a device so people can still open them while the service is down; your IT provider can confirm this is set up properly. Have a backup way online, like a mobile hotspot, that can get a few key people working again if the main connection drops. Bookmark the status pages for Microsoft 365 and your other core tools — it’s the fastest way to tell whether the problem is on their end or yours. Keep contacts off the cloud entirely, whether that’s a printout or your phone’s own address book. And ask your business continuity provider about proactive alerts that flag an outage before your customers do.

Keep the plan to one page

Keep it to a single page, somewhere reachable without your main systems — printed, or saved in a separate app. List your critical tools, your backup communication method, where the essentials live, who’s in charge, and who to call. Review it once or twice a year so names and numbers stay current — a plan with an ex-employee’s cell number on it isn’t much use at 2pm on a bad Tuesday. Businesses that already rely on our hosted VoIP phone system have an easier time here, since calls keep routing even when email and Teams don’t.

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn’t the cloud always available?
No. Cloud services are reliable most of the time, but even the biggest providers have outages — the CrowdStrike incident took millions of computers offline in a matter of hours. It’s safer to plan for an outage eventually happening than to assume it won’t.

What should a continuity plan actually include?
The basics: which tools are critical, a backup way to reach staff and customers, where essential information lives offline, who’s in charge during an outage, and who to call for help. One page covers it for most small businesses.

What if the internet itself goes down, not just one app?
Plan for that too. A mobile hotspot can get key people back online, and a phone call still works when your systems don’t. Keep important numbers somewhere that doesn’t require the internet.

How can my team keep working if Microsoft 365 is down?
It depends on the work, but options include files already synced to a device, switching to phone or text to stay in touch, and handling anything urgent on paper until service returns.

How long do outages usually last?
No fixed answer — some resolve in minutes, others take most of a day. That unpredictability is exactly why you plan around them rather than hoping for a quick fix.

Whose job is this to set up?
Yours, with help from your IT provider. They can flag which of your tools carry the most risk, set up synced files and status-page alerts, and help you put the one-page plan together.

Prepared by the EB Solution team — business continuity and managed IT services for businesses across the Greater Toronto Area. Don’t have a one-page plan yet? Talk to our team and we’ll help you build one.