Two big outages in a month: What to ask your IT provider

9 October 2026

Microsoft 365 and Salesforce both had major outages in the last few weeks. Here's what happened, why it matters, and the questions worth asking your IT provider before the next one.

The short answer

When the problem is inside Microsoft's or Salesforce's own systems, nobody can fix it faster from your end. What separates good providers from poor ones is how they communicate and what they do while you wait.

What happened

● Microsoft 365, 31 August to 3 September: a core authentication failure hit Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Purview and Copilot. Recovery took the better part of three days, with Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint among the last services restored.

● Salesforce, 16 September: an internal login service stalled requests worldwide, including the UK, for around four and a half hours, in the middle of its Dreamforce conference.

Is this a pattern?

Forrester predicted at the end of last year that AI data centre build-outs would trigger at least two major multi-day cloud outages in 2026, as providers shift attention and investment towards AI infrastructure. Two large outages inside three weeks fits that prediction uncomfortably well.

What good support looks like during an outage

● Clear, honest updates early. "We don't know yet, here's what we're checking" beats silence

● A real interim plan for anything business-critical, not just "we're monitoring it"

● Someone who will physically help where that's useful

● A follow-up afterwards on what happened and what could soften the impact next time

Which questions should you ask?

● Ask: "Walk me through the last time a major upstream outage hit a client. What did you actually do?"

● Don't ask: "Have you ever had an outage?" Most will say no, whether or not that's true

For scale

Parametrix estimated the 2024 CrowdStrike incident cost US Fortune 500 companies, excluding Microsoft, around $5.4 billion in direct losses, with only 10 to 20% insured. Outages don't have to be common to matter. They just need a provider with a plan for when one lands.

Maple's thoughts

You can't prevent a platform outage. You can choose a provider who tells you the truth quickly and has already thought about what to do next.

Want to see how this works in practice? Book a no-obligation chat with our London team: connect@mapletech.co.uk or 020 3900 4300.