On 11 September 2025, Microsoft confirmed a significant outage of Exchange Online that disrupted email and collaboration services across North America, with ripple effects into other regions. Users reported being unable to access mailboxes, send or receive emails, or log into related services such as Outlook and Teams. The disruption, tracked under service ID EX1151485, quickly became a reminder for IT leaders and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) around the world: what happens to your business if your cloud provider suffers downtime?
For New Zealand businesses, where Microsoft 365 is widely used as the default productivity suite, the lesson is clear. Cloud does not equal backup. To ensure resilience, organisations need independent, cloud to cloud backup solutions that protect data and enable quick recovery.
What happened in the outage
Microsoft first acknowledged the problem on 11 September, noting that certain infrastructure was experiencing “unexpectedly high CPU utilisation.”
This caused dismounts of Exchange databases and subsequent issues in mail flow and mailbox access.
Users reported being locked out of email, facing delays in sending and receiving messages, and struggling with Teams synchronisation.
Microsoft applied configuration changes and optimisations throughout the day. Partial recovery occurred within 14 hours, but full stability took longer. (Source)
Why this matters for New Zealand organisations
Many Kiwi businesses assume that because Microsoft hosts their data, it is fully safeguarded against downtime or loss. The reality is more nuanced:
1. Service Level Agreements do not guarantee data recoverability
Microsoft’s agreements focus on uptime. While there are basic retention tools, they do not provide full, granular or point-in-time restores. If a service disruption overlaps with accidental deletions, ransomware, or malicious insider actions, businesses may be left with limited recovery options.”
2. Downtime has a direct cost
In New Zealand, even a few hours without email or Teams can disrupt logistics, customer service, and sales. According to IDC estimates, the average cost of IT downtime in the Asia Pacific runs into thousands of dollars per hour. For small to medium enterprises (SMEs), a single day of disruption could mean lost contracts, late shipments, and reputational harm.
3. Regulatory compliance requires reliability
Under the Privacy Act 2020, organisations are expected to take reasonable steps to protect personal information and ensure continuity of access. If business communications or client records become unavailable, compliance risk rises.
How Cloud to Cloud backup reduces risk
This is where solutions like OpenText Core Cloud to Cloud Backup become vital. Rather than relying solely on the native retention settings of Microsoft 365, it creates independent backups of services including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and public folders.
Key features include:
Automated daily backups, with optional higher frequency backups (up to three times a day for critical workloads). (Source)
Granular and point-in-time restores. If an inbox or Teams channel was lost or corrupted just before an outage, IT teams can restore it to its state as it was minutes before the disruption. (Source)
Flexible storage options, including Bring Your Own Storage (BYOS) with AWS S3. For New Zealand organisations, this allows backup data to be stored in Australia or other compliant regions, ensuring adherence to data sovereignty requirements. (Source)
Transparent billing and flexible retention policies enable businesses to predict costs and align data protection with their compliance obligations.
A practical checklist for New Zealand businesses
If you are an IT leader, MSP, or business owner in New Zealand, the Exchange outage provides a timely opportunity to assess your own preparedness. Here are six steps to take immediately:
1. Audit your Microsoft 365 environment
Review your current retention policies. How frequently is your data backed up, and how far back can you restore?
2. Test your recovery plan
Run a live test by restoring a single mailbox or Teams channel. Measure how long it takes and verify whether the restored data aligns with your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
3. Ensure off-platform redundancy
Storing backups in the same platform as the live system (for example, within Microsoft 365 only) leaves you exposed. Independent storage in another region or provider mitigates this risk.
4. Map compliance requirements
Cross-check your data protection policies against the Privacy Act 2020 and any sector-specific requirements, such as those in finance, healthcare, or government.
5. Review vendor SLAs
Check the guarantees your backup provider offers for restore times and availability. For MSPs, this is crucial for building trust with clients.
6. Communicate with your stakeholders
Outages affect end users as much as IT. Ensure staff understand the safeguards in place and communicate promptly when incidents occur.
Bringing it home for New Zealand
Cloud adoption in New Zealand is accelerating. Microsoft 365 dominates the market, and SaaS tools are now integral to everything from accounting and HR to customer service. Yet this dependence creates a single point of failure if businesses assume “the cloud has it covered.”
The 11 September Exchange outage is a reminder that infrastructure failures do happen, even at the largest providers. For Kiwi SMEs and enterprises, the answer is not to abandon cloud, but to back it up with tools built for continuity.
OpenText Core Cloud to Cloud Backup provides a way to bridge the gap between Microsoft’s SLAs and the real-world needs of businesses. With automated backups, granular restores, and storage options that respect New Zealand’s data sovereignty concerns, it ensures that when outages strike, recovery is measured in minutes, not days.
Conclusion
Downtime is expensive, disruptive, and inevitable. But data loss and long recovery times do not have to be. By combining Microsoft 365 with a trusted third-party backup solution like OpenText Core Cloud to Cloud Backup, New Zealand organisations can protect their data, ensure compliance, and reassure staff and customers that business continuity is a given, even in the face of the unexpected.
Next step: Talk to your IT provider or MSP today about testing a point-in-time restore of your Microsoft 365 data. It could make the difference between a frustrating day and a critical business failure. For more information on Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, contact our sales team today.
