Most work now runs through a few tools: email, chat apps like Teams or Slack, and shared files in OneDrive, SharePoint or Google Drive. Contracts get signed over email. Decisions get made in chat. The files everyone needs are stored online. Work stops when those tools go down.
They go down more often than you might think:
- November 2026: A Microsoft 365 outage knocked out Outlook for more than a day. Teams, SharePoint and other Microsoft services went down with it. (Microsoft 365 Status)
- June 2025: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Meet and most other Google Workspace apps stopped working on the same afternoon. (Android Authority)
- November 2024: Outlook went down on and off for most of a day. Microsoft said a change on its end set off a flood of traffic its systems couldn’t handle. (ThousandEyes)
- December 2020: Gmail, Google Drive, Calendar and Meet all went down at once. For some people, Gmail was out for about two hours. (Fortune)
Outages like these come with running services at this scale. The bigger risk is on the customer side: when email, messaging and files all come from one provider, a single failure cuts off all three.
What to do when Outlook is down
If Outlook or Gmail is down right now:
- Check the provider’s status page (Microsoft 365 Status or the Google Workspace Status Dashboard) before troubleshooting your own setup.
- Move urgent, sensitive work to your backup channel if you have one. Don’t fall back to personal email or text messages for anything sensitive.
- Call the customers and partners who are waiting on you.
When the problem is a hacker, not an outage
Outages aren’t the only risk. Imagine a hacker breaks into your company’s Microsoft or Google account. The email your team would use to deal with the attack may be the same email the hacker is reading. Security teams plan for this by keeping a separate way to communicate that doesn’t depend on the system that was hacked. Security pros call this “out-of-band communication.”
How to add email to your business continuity plan in six steps
1. Decide what’s urgent. List the communications that can’t be delayed, such as customer escalations, payment approvals, contract deadlines and incident coordination. Your backup needs to handle everything on that list.
2. Pick a channel that runs on separate infrastructure. A second account on the same platform won’t help if the platform is down. If you handle sensitive or regulated data, the backup also has to be secure enough for that data. PreVeil meets all these requirements.
3. Set it up before you need it. Get accounts, apps and logins ready ahead of time. Once email is down, you can’t email anyone instructions for the backup.
4. Write it down. Add the alternate channel to your business continuity and incident response plans, along with who decides when to switch.
5. Tell your team. One line in an all-hands or onboarding doc is sufficient: “If email is down, use X.”
6. Test it. Have a team spend a morning handling real tasks through the backup channel, then fix whatever confused them.
Where PreVeil fits
PreVeil provides end-to-end encrypted email and file sharing on its own infrastructure, separate from Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Most of our customers use it alongside Outlook or Gmail for sensitive information like CUI or HIPAA. Because PreVeil is separate, it keeps working when the primary provider has an outage. Because it’s end-to-end encrypted, an attacker in your Microsoft or Google tenant can’t read PreVeil messages, so CUI stays accessible and protected even if your commercial email is down or breached.
