Last week, Microsoft 365 experienced a significant outage that disrupted email services for businesses worldwide. For several hours, companies could not send or receive messages. The Microsoft 365 Admin Center, typically the go-to resource for checking service status, was also affected.
If your team relies on email for daily operations, you probably felt the impact.
Why This Matters
Outages happen. Even the most reliable platforms experience disruptions. Microsoft, Google, AWS—they all have incidents. The question is not whether your systems will go down, but what happens to your business when they do.
For many organizations, email is not optional. It is how they communicate with clients, coordinate with teams, and keep operations moving. When it stops working, everything else stops too.
The Difference Preparation Makes
During the outage, our clients who use our email security and continuity service called MXINSPECT, experienced minimal disruption. MXINSPECT includes an Emergency Mailbox feature—which is a 24×7 temporary mailbox that provides users with email access when their normal mail environment is unavailable. When Microsoft went down, these clients switched over and continued sending and receiving messages.
This is what email continuity looks like in practice. While others waited for service restoration, businesses with backup systems kept operating.
Building Your Safety Net
Think about your own infrastructure. What happens when your primary email provider goes down for hours or days? Do you have alternatives ready? Does your team know what to do?
The time to figure this out is not during an outage. It is right now, when everything is working fine.
Take 30 minutes this week to map out your critical systems and identify what would happen if each one went down. Then put backup options in place. Email continuity, data redundancy, communication alternatives—these are not luxuries. They are necessities.
Your future self will thank you.
