Kalab Templeman

On Thursday 12 November, Microsoft confirmed a widespread outage affecting Exchange Online and other Microsoft 365 services. More than 120,000 users reported Outlook problems on Downdetector, and the disruption reached Teams, Copilot, SharePoint and more than a dozen other services. Microsoft’s status account said a portion of its infrastructure was under elevated load across multiple regions. It started midday in the US, which was overnight into Friday for us in Sydney.

At the time of writing the cause hasn’t been fully explained. There was speculation about a cyberattack, but I haven’t seen Microsoft confirm that, so I won’t guess. What I can talk about is what it’s like when your email, files, calendar and chat all sit behind one login.

Why I take this personally

In March, my main Google account was disabled, and I lost ten years of YouTube content, business emails and client files in Drive. In July, my Instagram account went the same way, with no warning and no appeal option. I wrote about both in Why Every Freelancer Needs a Backup Strategy (Not Just a Backup), where I called an external drive “the backup that can’t be deleted by an algorithm.”

I also wrote about the first one in why you should never put all your eggs in one basket. Thursday’s outage is the same lesson on a shorter timer.

Three different ways you can lose your work

People lump these together, but they need different fixes.

• An outage. Your files are fine, but you can’t reach them for hours or days. This is what happened on Thursday.
• Losing the account. It gets disabled, hacked or deleted, and there may be nobody to appeal to. This is what happened to me twice.
• Losing the hardware. A drive dies, a laptop is stolen, a phone ends up in a pool.

The first one is temporary and the second can be permanent, but the cause is the same. Your access depends on someone else’s systems staying up and staying friendly.

What a backup can and can’t do

A backup doesn’t stop an outage. It only helps if you can open it without the service that’s down. A copy that lives inside the same Microsoft account is not a second copy in any useful sense. If Microsoft is down, so is that.

Cloud-only backups have a second problem. You’re trusting a company’s automated systems and support queue to keep your access intact. I’ve tested how that goes, and it doesn’t always go well.

So the rule that matters is where the copy sits and who controls it.

What I do

I follow the 3-2-1 rule:

• Three copies of your data (the original plus two backups)
• Two different types of storage, such as a physical drive and a cloud service
• One copy somewhere else, so a fire, flood or break-in can’t take everything at once

In practice:

• My working files stay on my main device
• I back up to an external drive that no platform can switch off
• I keep a cloud copy as a second layer, not the only one
• I automate it wherever I can, because a backup that relies on me remembering will eventually be skipped

How often matters too. If you’re mid-project, back up at the end of every shoot day, not when the project wraps. Footage that exists on one card or one drive overnight is one accident away from gone. For invoices and general business files, weekly is usually enough, as long as something reminds you or does it for you.

The part people forget: email and contacts

Files are only half of it. Thursday cut people off from email, and for a lot of businesses that’s the main way clients reach them. A few things help here:

• Run business email on your own domain. If your provider fails, you can point the domain at another one.
• I keep a local copy of my business email in Thunderbird, set to download full messages, and I copy the Thunderbird profile folder to my external drive.
• I export my contacts to a CSV file and keep it on the same drive, with a reminder to refresh it.
• Keep client phone numbers in your phone, not only in Outlook.
• Agree a second way to reach clients, like a mobile number or a messaging app, before you need it.
• Keep recovery codes and password manager access somewhere separate from the account they protect.
• Don’t let one account be the only way into your other accounts.

Quick checklist

• Do you have a copy of your important files on something you own?
• Is there a copy outside your house, and outside Microsoft?
• Have you opened a backup file recently to check it works?
• Could you tell a client you’re having trouble without using the service that’s broken?
• If your main account vanished tomorrow, what would you lose permanently?

If any of those get an uncomfortable answer, that’s the thing to fix this week.

Why it matters more for media work

If you shoot weddings, sports or client projects, your files are deliverables, not just personal memories. “My account got disabled” or “Microsoft was down” isn’t something a client wants to hear, even when it’s true. Losing their footage can cost you the client as well as the hours.

None of this needs an expensive setup. It needs a few decisions made on a quiet day, because nobody sets it up in the middle of an outage.