Most of us only think about the tools we depend on when they stop working. This week, a lot of people got that reminder at the same time.
On Thursday 12 November, millions of people logged on and couldn’t open their email. As I’m writing this on Friday, Microsoft is still working to fully restore service. Outlook, Teams and Copilot have been disrupted in 74 countries. Microsoft has ruled out a cyber-security incident, but for a while even its own status page wouldn’t load.
This isn’t really about Microsoft, though. Every big provider has outages, and they’ll keep having them. So the useful question isn’t whether something you rely on will fail. It’s what happens to you when it does.
Not my department? Why marketing should care
It’s easy to see an email outage as IT’s problem. But email and Teams quietly hold a lot of marketing together. New enquiries sit unanswered and campaign approvals stall. Meanwhile, paid campaigns carry on spending whether anyone is watching or not, and automated emails and reports can stop without anyone noticing for days.
Timing matters too. For charities and membership organisations, losing a day on Giving Tuesday (1 December this year) or the week before renewals isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a fundraising problem.
Plan B: 6 things worth doing
None of these need a big budget, and you could start most in a bit of enforced downtime this afternoon!
Write down what you rely on. List every platform your marketing and customer journey touch, and who runs each one.
Have a second option for the important stuff. If losing something for a day would really hurt, give it a fallback, such as another way to receive enquiries.
Agree who does what in advance. Who can pause a campaign? Who updates customers? One page agreed now beats working it out on the day.
Don’t rely on the broken thing to announce it’s broken. Social channels, SMS or a simple holding page can all do the job.
Set up alerts. GA4 and most analytics tools can warn you when enquiries, sign-ups or donations suddenly drop, giving you time to pause ad spend.
Try it out. Once or twice a year, spend half an hour asking ‘what if?’ What if email went down the morning your winter appeal launched?
How we can help
We look at digital marketing as one joined-up system, which makes it easier to spot where someone else’s bad day could turn into yours. We can map what your customer or supporter journey depends on (Understand), make sure you can pause ad spend quickly (Engage) and set up alerts on the forms that matter most (Convert).
We’re a marketing team, not an IT provider, so email hosting and back-ups are one for your IT partner. We’re happy to work alongside them, though.
Need some help preparing for the next outage? Want to find out more? We offer free initial consultations, so get in touch with us on 0118 4050 203 / info@cyberlogical.co.uk
