Most businesses now run with at least some services in the cloud. Email, files, accounting, bookings, payments, is all online. What happens when one or all of those services go down? Nobody can send an email, open a file, take a payments or contact you staff, clients and / or suppliers. It doesn’t take a hacker for this to happen, all it takes is an issue with your ISP, power issues in your area, a problem with a data center or service provider.
Outages happen, even to the big names
Microsoft 365 itself has had days where Outlook or Teams stopped working for hours. Internet providers have bad days too, and when yours does, everything online goes down with it. Any tool you depend on can go down and the work that depends on it stops until it’s back online. Being with a big named providers doesn’t protect you from this as they too can have issues.
What an outage does to a small business
When a key service goes down, your team can’t get to email or files, so work stops. If your payment or booking system is offline, you can’t take money or appointments. Customers trying to reach you can’t and you can’t reach them either. Staff end up sitting around doing nothing and waiting for things to come back online. You usually can’t fix it yourself. When a big provider has an outage, all you can do is wait for them to sort it out. The goal of a plan is to keep working, and keep customers informed, until everything is back online.
What a simple plan covers
A good plan answers these questions:
- Which tools are critical? List the handful of services that would stop the business if they are down. This would include services like email (Outlook, Gmail, etc), your accounting system (Xero, MYOB etc), your communication tools (Teams, WhatsApp etc). Ignore the ones you could live without for a day or so and focus on the few that would halt your work.
- How will people keep in touch? Have a backup way to reach staff and customers that doesn’t depend on the tool that is down. That might be phone numbers, a group chat on a different app or even just text messages.
- What do you need reachable offline? Keep a copy of the essentials, like your customer contact list, key phone numbers and important documents, somewhere you can open if the main system is down. A printout or a copy on a phone is enough.
- Who is in charge? Decide who makes the decisions during an outage and who keeps customers updated. When it’s clear in advance, people act instead of waiting to be told.
- Where do you check, and who do you call? Know where to see whether it’s a wider outage, which is usually the provider’s status page, and who to call for help, which is usually your IT provider. Check out our Status Page, which lists the websites for all major providers.
What to do the moment an outage hits
Know before it happens on what to do if an outage happens:
- Check whether it’s just you. Look at the provider’s status page, or ask whether anyone else is having the same problem (see our Status Page)
- If it’s a wider outage, there is nothing to fix on your end, so stop trying and look to implement your outage plan.
- Tell your team. Let people know what’s down and what to use instead, so nobody wastes an hour rebooting their computer that was never the problem.
- Tell customers if it affects them. If you can’t take bookings or payments, say so and tell them when to try again.
- Switch to your backup way to communicate. Move to the phone, text or another app so the team can still coordinate.
- Note when it started and what’s affected. A couple of lines is enough. It helps you follow up afterward and spot anything that needs fixing once things are back online.
A few things that make outages hurt less
Here are a few things to help when outages happen:
- Keep key files available offline. With OneDrive or SharePoint, recent files can sync to the device so you can still open them when the service is down. Ask your IT provider to make sure this is set up.
- Have a backup way to get online. A mobile hotspot from a phone can get a few key people working or look at implementing a backup internet connection that can keep your entire team online.
- Know your status pages. Bookmark our Status Page to determine whether the problem is them or you.
- Keep contacts off the cloud. Have your important phone numbers and contacts somewhere that doesn’t need the internet, eg a printout or your phone’s own contact list.
- Ask your IT provider about alerts. Many can set up a warning that tells you about an outage before your customers do.
- Keep your plan simple and try to contain it to a single page
Keep this somewhere you can reach without your main systems, whether that’s printed or in a separate app. Write down your critical tools, your backup way to communicate, where the essentials live, who’s in charge, and who to call. Review it once or twice a year so the names and numbers stay current.
Frequently Asked Questions
Isn’t the cloud always available?
No. Cloud services are reliable, but they still have outages, and even the biggest providers go down sometimes. Microsoft, Google, Apple and other online service providers do have issues. It is safer to assume an outage will happen eventually and have a plan for it.
What should a continuity plan include?
The basics: which tools are critical, a backup way to reach staff and customers, where to find essential information if the main system is down, who’s in charge during an outage, and who to call for help. One page is enough for most small businesses.
What if the internet itself goes down, not just one app?
Plan for that too. A mobile hotspot from a phone can get key people back online or a full failover system can keep your entire team online. Keep important numbers and contacts somewhere that does not need the internet.
How can my team keep working if my service is down?
It depends on the work, but options include using files already saved on a synced 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?
There’s no set answer. Some are fixed in minutes, others can take most of a day, it all depends on what went wrong. That is the reason to plan around them, since you can’t count on a quick fix and you can’t speed it up from your end.
Whose job is this?
Yours, with help from your IT provider. They can tell you which of your tools are most at risk, set up things like synced files and a status-page alert, and help you write a simple plan. Please contact us to discuss your options.