Observe, Communicate, Execute: A Contingency Playbook for Microsoft Teams and Zoom Outages

Is your organization prepared for the next Microsoft Teams or Zoom disruption? Take these steps to ensure business continuity the next time your primary UCaaS platform goes down.

How much harm can businesses sustain when Microsoft Teams or Zoom goes dark? With Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platforms at the core of daily operations, every minute counts.

Yet on April 15, Microsoft Teams confirmed a major issue that prevented users from sharing or viewing files, disrupting collaboration across organizations. The issue was traced to a recent backend update, forcing Microsoft to halt the rollout, revert the change, and get users to restart. After three hours of widespread frustration, Microsoft confirmed the issue had been resolved.

The very next day, April 16, Zoom faced its own disruption. Between 2:25 P.M. ET and 4:12 P.M. ET, a miscommunication between Zoom’s registrar and GoDaddy resulted in a server block by GoDaddy Registry, which temporarily took down the zoom.us domain. While a security breach or DDoS attack didn’t cause this issue, it still led to a brief but massive outage. At the peak of the incident, users reported over 59,000 outages.

Insights From HP | Vyopta Data

HP | Vyopta is a leading provider of digital user experience management for unified communications and collaboration. By integrating into the HP Workforce Experience Platform (WXP), our customers gain the visibility, telemetry, automation, and intelligence they need to quickly detect issues across the network, meeting room systems, personal devices, and collaboration platforms. Whether it’s Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or any other critical UCaaS platform, we monitor service health continuously and alert IT the moment anomalies appear, giving them time to activate internal contingency plans for outages.

For example, declines in Zoom communication activity began on April 16. Figure 1 shows that Zoom activity dropped sharply during the outage compared to both earlier in the day and the average usage over the previous four days.

However, a deeper dive into the data reveals more about the scope and extent of the disruption:

• Many HP | Vyopta customers were back on Zoom within the first hour of the outage, which helped them keep meetings on track with minimal disruption.
• By the second hour, even more customers had resumed their meetings, and by the third hour, most were back to normal activity levels.
• About 25% of the organizations we analyzed had no Zoom meetings during the outage—suggesting they paused communications or switched to other UCaaS platforms and communication options.
• Roughly 40% saw their meeting activity drop by more than 10% compared to the previous four business days, also indicating a shift in UCaaS platforms or communications options used or a pause in communications.
• The rest of our customers saw little to no impact, with Zoom usage staying within 10% of their normal levels.

In addition, many of our customers use secondary—and in some cases, even tertiary—UCaaS platforms. During the Zoom outage, our tracking showed a noticeable uptick in meeting activity on those backup platforms, as shown in Figure 2. Interestingly, usage on these secondary platforms remained above normal levels for up to two hours after Zoom service was fully restored.

Strategies for Resiliency: How to Prepare for the Next UCaaS Outage

If these recent back-to-back outages have shown us anything, it’s that UCaaS resilience can’t be left to chance. For organizations that rely on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or similar platforms, here are a few key actions to help minimize disruption and keep your business moving:

1. Build a clear communication contingency plan

Outline alternative communication tools and workflows for when your primary UCaaS platform goes down. Identify the core channels your teams rely on—voice, video, messaging, email—and define what to use when those fail.

2. Set up backup communication methods

Maintain and regularly test backup options like mobile phones, traditional phone lines, email, or a secondary UCaaS platform. Also, define how your IT team will share updates during an outage—who communicates what, how often, and through which channels.

3. Activate the plan fast and communicate clearly

When an outage hits, don’t hesitate. Notify employees immediately about which backup tools to use and provide regular updates on the issue and resolution timeline. Assign a team to coordinate internal communication alongside IT’s response.

4. Review and improve post-outage

Once service is restored, run a quick post-mortem. What worked? What didn’t? Use those insights to refine your plan and strengthen your response for the next time.

Conclusion

UCaaS outages are operational risks that demand proactive planning and swift, efficient execution. Whether it’s a configuration error, a domain-level block, a network outage, or a vendor-side deployment gone wrong, the cost of inaction can be alarmingly high for businesses.

HP’s Vyopta and WXP platforms give businesses the tools to spot problems early, respond instantly, and keep their teams connected—especially when it matters most. If business continuity is mission-critical to you, now’s the time to equip your organization for whatever comes next.

HP Workforce Experience Platform¹ is a comprehensive digital employee experience solution that enables organizations to optimize IT for every employee’s needs.

¹The HP Workforce Experience Platform Device Management application currently requires new or existing HP Proactive Insights Service. Offer available through April 30, 2025, for the remainder of the HP Proactive Insights license term. Access will be granted to migrate to the HP Workforce Experience Platform upon availability in the country where HP Proactive Insights was sold.