Meanwhile we were very happy that we mainly rely on email. We were still able to send out urgent messages (like "sorry if we don't reply, Microsoft is down, you can reach us by [phone] or [backup email]") via SMTP and if we really needed to receive some email, we'd be able to set up a secondary MX record to a holding server in about an hour.

If we were mainly using Teams or whatever other "better than email" service and that had an outage, we'd actually be in the dark!

As the resident complainer about Microsoft lock-in, I was honestly quite surprised by how well we could work around this. Don't get me wrong, if it was Entra that fell over, we'd be thoroughly fucked, but Exchange wasn't all that bad.