Microsoft Went Down. How Much of Your Company Went With It?

Microsoft outage exposes a deeper risk

Yesterday, Microsoft went down. Millions of people and businesses lost access to their email, documents, and collaboration tools. SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook. All suddenly out of reach. It is a scene we have seen before, not just with Microsoft, but with AWS, Google, and even AI providers. Each time, the same question comes up: how much of your company disappears when your cloud provider does?

It is easy to focus on the inconvenience. Teams can’t chat. Files are locked up. Projects stall for a few hours. But the real risk runs deeper. If you lose access to your provider, do you lose access to your company’s knowledge, data, and intellectual property? That is what these outages are really reminding us: our businesses are built on infrastructure we do not control.

Building value on someone else’s land

Every company spends years accumulating value. Customer data, internal processes, business intelligence, the collective knowledge of your team. These are the things that make your company unique. Increasingly, though, all of it lives inside someone else’s platform. We use these tools because they are powerful and efficient. But over time, the dependency grows.

We might own our information legally. But do we control it? Can we access it, move it, or use it independently? Owning your data and controlling your data are two different things. It is like building your house on someone else’s land. You own the furniture and everything inside. But if the landowner locks the gate or changes the rules, your access is gone. The more valuable your assets become, the more consequential that risk is.

What matters is the knowledge, not the tool

Not every piece of technology needs to be yours. We are not arguing for building everything in-house. That is not always practical. But your data, your institutional knowledge, your intellectual property, your processes, your accumulated intelligence ; these are the core of your company’s value. They are not just files or databases. They are years of hard-won experience and insight. And in the age of AI, they matter more than ever.

The more context and knowledge you have, the more powerful your AI systems can be. Company knowledge is becoming a major competitive advantage. Losing control over it is not just an IT risk. It is a strategic one. If your essential assets are inseparable from a single provider, you are vulnerable to more than downtime. You risk letting the heart of your business drift outside your control.

How we handle this at REBL

This is something we think about every day at REBL. We are not claiming to have all the answers. But we are deliberate about where our most valuable assets live and how much control we keep. One example is our approach to AI. Instead of pouring all our knowledge and AI capabilities into a single provider, we have built our own AI layer. That connects our internal knowledge and systems to whichever AI model fits the job: maybe Claude today, maybe ChatGPT tomorrow.

The important thing is that our processes, context, and accumulated intelligence remain part of our own infrastructure. Not locked inside a third party. We do the same with file storage, internal communication, and collaboration. We use great platforms, but we make sure we can keep operating even if one goes down. Not because we think we can out-build Microsoft or Google. But because we believe our company’s most valuable assets should always remain ours. This is not a finished solution. It is an ongoing effort.

Control does not mean building everything yourself

Let’s be clear: this is not about turning your back on cloud providers or external platforms. That would be inefficient for most companies. Microsoft, Google, AWS, and others give us incredible capabilities. The right move is to use them. But don’t make your most valuable assets inseparable from any single provider. You can rely on the cloud and still keep independent backups, portable data, and documented processes. Building your own infrastructure is not a guarantee of security or reliability. What matters is having a deliberate strategy to maintain control over what defines your business.

Resilience comes from understanding your dependencies and making sure they do not become irreversible. Ask yourself: if your main provider disappeared tomorrow, could you still access your knowledge? Could your team keep working? Could you move your information elsewhere without starting over?

Where does your company’s value actually live?

Founders spend years building products, teams, and intellectual property. But we rarely stop to ask: where does all that value actually live? If your cloud provider, collaboration platform, or AI service goes down, does your company go with it? The risk is not just a few hours of downtime. It is waking up to find the company you have built is more dependent on someone else’s infrastructure than you realized.

Technology outages will keep happening. No provider can guarantee perfect uptime. Use the best tools. Build on top of great platforms. But make sure the data, knowledge, and intellectual property you are accumulating remain yours. Because the next time a major outage hits, the real question is not whether your favorite tool is working. It is whether your company can keep moving without it.