Vendor failure guide
Microsoft 365 outage plan for MSPs
A Microsoft outage can remove identity, email, collaboration, device management, and parts of the management stack at once. Prepare the independent response before those dependencies become unavailable.
Verify without the affected tenant
Use independent monitoring and status sources, then record confirmed impact separately from assumptions.
Move communications out of band
Your responder channel, escalation contacts, and client contacts must remain available without Teams or Exchange Online.
Recover controlled administration
Use dedicated emergency administrator accounts, independent MFA, quorum approval, and a credential path outside the normal vault.
Map clients and critical services
Identify which clients depend on Entra ID, Microsoft 365, Intune, Azure, and Microsoft-backed MSP tooling before the outage.
Exercise and preserve evidence
Test from a clean session, record decisions and timings, rotate used credentials, and assign improvement actions.
Turn the checklist into a tested plan
Glassbreak's response pack creates four editable phases and twelve concrete steps. Assign client-specific roles, store independent access information, and run the result as a tabletop.
Related guidance: identity-provider outage checklist, out-of-band communications plan, and password-manager outage recovery.