A third outage in less than two weeks has cut access to Microsoft 365 cloud apps such as Microsoft Teams and Outlook, impacting businesses on October 7, 2020.

At 2:48 p.m. EDT, Microsoft tweeted “We‘re investigating an issue affecting access to Microsoft 365 services. Users may see impact to Microsoft Teams, Outlook, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Outlook.com.”

An hour later, the company followed up with a second tweet, which said “We’ve identified a recent change that may have resulted in impact to multiple Microsoft 365 services. We’ve reverted the change and services are recovering.”

Then, at 4:19 p.m., it tweeted “Our investigation determined that a network infrastructure change resulted in accessibility issues. Our telemetry indicates that service is recovering following the reversion.”

Outages Highlight Need for SaaS Email Protection Services

As noted above, this is the third, recent outage impacting Microsoft 365 users. On September 28, 2020, users of cloud-based Microsoft applications including Teams, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Exchange, Sharepoint, OneDrive, and Azure were unable to access the business-critical applications for up to five hours.

A Microsoft spokesperson stated there was no reason to believe the first outage was a result of malicious activity, but the cause remains unclear. However, it’s still an indicator of an imperative need to protect cloud-based business data for businesses large and small. Many think cloud-based data will always be accessible, but that simply isn’t the case. Worse yet, contrary to popular belief, it’s not always Microsoft’s responsibility to restore lost data.

That was followed by a second outage just two days later October 1, 2020. During the second outage, users were unable to access Email via Microsoft Outlook. This one was due to a Microsoft configuration change.

All of these outages impact business productivity. Outages like this can put your clients at risk of data loss and costly business downtime.

That’s why SaaS Email Backup is a crucial. SaaS Email Protection provides a simple, streamlined process to export Microsoft data to ensure “offline” continuity. For example, if a client needs to reference a file but can’t access Microsoft 365, you can use an exported version of the latest backup to continue productivity. Once Microsoft systems are back online, the latest version can be uploaded back into OneDrive. SaaS Email Protection can also make it easier for businesses to resume conversations they may have been having in Microsoft Teams. During an outage, we can export all public channel conversations in an easy to read format to ensure clients’ can continue remote collaboration without disruption.

Learn how SaaS Email Protection can help keep your data secure and accessible during Microsoft outages in the info below: