What to Do When a Service You Use is Down; 5 Tips on How to Survive a Tech Outage

What to Do When a Service You Use is Down; 5 Tips on How to Survive a Tech Outage

If you were using any Microsoft products on Monday (March 15th) you may have been party to the outage that took down services such as Office 365 and Teams worldwide.

The outage was caused by an Azure authentication error (you can learn more here) and lasted roughly 14 hours. Whether you experienced this particular outage or not we have all experienced an outage that took out a tech service that is critical to doing our job or supporting the systems we use every day.

Here are our top 5 tips to surviving a tech outage that is impacting your business:

  1. First of all, don’t panic. Outages are normal in the tech world, and sometimes even necessary if it’s a planned downtime event. Usually planned events will occur at times that are less inconvenient for most workplaces (late at night typically), and you will probably get some kind of notice, so you know to expect it.

  2. Determine that the outage is outside of your control. If a service is down, it’s a good idea to determine whether it’s on your end or truly due to the service provider. If it’s a popular well-known service (such as in the Microsoft case) you can usually check Google as an outage will be news. Another good place to check is their social media pages to see if there’s any mention of the outage by their team; Twitter especially seems to be the place many businesses convey outage news.

  3. If you’ve come to the conclusion it’s not on your end, reach out to their customer service. They may be swamped if it’s a large outage but if it’s just something to do with your particular instance they can probably assist you in getting back up. If you have a technology service provider you work with they can help manage this task for you.

  4. Reach out to your tech team if you have one. If you have an in-house tech team or a technology service provider behind your business, they can troubleshoot the outage for you and determine next best steps to getting your services back up.

  5. Check the post-outage documentation. It often helps to know why an outage occurred, especially if it was due to an update that may have changed things within the service.

Outages are a good case in point for having a tech team behind your business, they can help navigate the issue for you and if your case does need to be escalated, they will know exactly who to contact.

If you’re on your own trying and to Google fixes it can often lead you down a rabbit hole where the recommendations may not even be relevant to your particular instance.

In general, we don’t recommend trying to navigate severe issues on your own, especially if the affected program host critical data or systems for your business. The “fix” you try may be worse than the problem that was causing the outage in the first place.

 

If you have been looking for a team that can support your business in navigating tech outages and more, Valley Techlogic is a seasoned technical service provider and we have plans that can fit every business. You can learn more by booking a free consultation here.

Looking for more to read? We suggest these tech articles from the last week.

This article was powered by Valley TechLogic, an IT provider in Atwater, CA. You can find more information at https://www.valleytechlogic.com/ or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/valleytechlogic/ . Follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/valleytechlogic.