CIO Brief: Planning for the Day Your Identity Provider Is Unavailable
Retrospective: this article looks back at events from November 2018, written in 2026 with the benefit of hindsight.
The short version: In 2018, Microsoft's multi-factor authentication service had a major outage, and many organizations couldn't sign in to their email and cloud apps for hours. Security that depends on one service fails when that service fails.
Why identity needs a resilience plan
Requiring multi-factor authentication for everyone is the right decision. But it means your identity provider becomes a single point of failure for the whole business. Outages are rare, but they happen to every provider.
The business impact
- Productivity loss across the company.
- Administrators locked out when they need access most.
- Risky improvisation, like disabling security controls in a hurry and forgetting to turn them back on.
Questions to ask your team
- Do we have emergency administrator accounts that would work during an outage, and when were they last tested?
- How would we communicate with employees if email and Teams were unavailable?
- Who is authorized to relax security controls during an outage, and how are those changes reversed?
What good looks like
Two tested emergency access accounts with strong, independent protection, a short outage runbook, an out-of-band communication channel, and clear authority for temporary changes.
The decision
Ask when your emergency access accounts were last tested. If nobody knows, schedule a test this month — it takes less than an hour.
- The Azure AD MFA Outage of November 2018: When Sign-In Itself Goes Down Incident Teardowns
- How to Create and Monitor Break-Glass Emergency Access Accounts in Entra ID How-To & Hardening
- Identity Outage Runbook: What to Do When MFA Is Down How-To & Hardening