We live in a world where business stops when the cloud goes dark. On July 9th, a misconfigured update in Microsoft 365 knocked out Outlook, Exchange, and Teams for 19 hours. For global companies, that meant no email, no calendars, and no collaboration. Slack faced its own outage in May, halting workflows for two hours. To customers, these moments feel like a broken promise.
CX leaders often assume outages are IT’s problem. But here’s the reality: every outage is a customer experience crisis. Customers don’t distinguish between “vendor downtime” and “your brand.” To them, the journey broke. And when the journey breaks, trust erodes.
The financial impact of downtime is staggering. A single day of Microsoft 365 disruption translates into billions in lost productivity worldwide. But the hidden costs are often worse: customer frustration, reputational damage, and the perception that your brand isn’t reliable.
Today’s enterprises run on interdependent platforms. One outage ripples through supply chains, customer service centers, and sales teams. The brand damage isn’t measured in minutes offline — it’s measured in months of eroded goodwill.
Here’s the mistake too many companies make: treating outages as technical glitches instead of customer experience moments. Every second of silence during downtime feels like neglect. Customers want transparency, updates, and reassurance — even if the fix is out of your hands.
That means CX leaders need contingency playbooks:
“Every outage is a customer experience crisis — not just an IT issue.”
No company can prevent every outage, but every company can design for resilience. That starts with redundancy — alternate systems and failover capabilities. It extends to recovery — compensating customers quickly and transparently. And it ends with accountability — owning the experience even when the cause is external.
The best companies turn outages into opportunities. They over-communicate, empathize, and show leadership in the moment. That’s why customers often forgive brands like Apple when things break — because they step up, explain, and fix.
The lesson is clear: downtime will happen. What matters is how you respond.
Calder & Lane helps enterprises and mid-market firms build CX Resilience Playbooks that turn outage moments into trust-building moments. Don’t wait for the next disruption.
