Accessing Your Microsoft 365 Backups in Veeam Data Cloud During a Microsoft Outage

When Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Entra ID goes down, "Sign in with Microsoft" goes down with it. Veeam Data Cloud gives you a second way in: Continue with Veeam, which authenticates you with your Veeam My Account (my.veeam.com) credentials instead of Entra ID. Once you're in, you can browse and search the backed-up email, documents and Entra ID objects you already hold in Veeam Data Cloud while you wait for Microsoft to recover. Since my.veeam.com accounts utilize MFA, when this is set up, the recovery codes are crucial in these outages to ensure you can continue to access.

The catch is that this route only works if you set it up before the outage. The rest of this article covers how to prepare, how to sign in, and what you can and can't do while Microsoft is offline.

Do these steps immediately during the set up of Veeam Data Cloud, you can't do them during an outage.

1. Create a Veeam My Account. Sign up at my.veeam.com with the same work email address (UPN) you were invited to Veeam Data Cloud with. Veeam Data Cloud only accepts UPN accounts from your organization's domain, not aliases.
2. Turn on MFA for that Veeam account. Veeam Data Cloud requires multi-factor authentication for anyone who signs in with Veeam My Account (Accessing Veeam Data Cloud). Use an authenticator app and download and save the recovery codes.
3. Make sure the right people are invited to Veeam Data Cloud. An OrganizationAdmin invites users under Settings > Users > Invite User and assigns a role such as Viewer, Admin or a workload role scoped to Microsoft 365 or Entra ID. Give at least two admins, plus the people who will need to read data, a role. Have these users create Veeam accounts.
4. Don't rely only on Entra ID group access. Access granted through Entra ID SSO groups depends on Entra ID. Invite your users directly, so their roles live in Veeam Data Cloud itself.
5. Test it. Sign out, go to cloud.veeam.com, choose Continue with Veeam, and confirm you can access cloud.veeam.com with your Veeam account.
6. Write down the access details somewhere outside Microsoft 365. Record the portal URL, who holds break-glass access, and how to reach Veeam Support. Store them somewhere that isn't Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint or Teams, such as a printed runbook or a separate password manager.

If your organization signed up through a Veeam service provider, ask the provider how they handle Veeam-account access for your users.

1. Open https://cloud.veeam.com in Chrome, Edge (Chromium) or Firefox. You can also use the link from your original invitation email if you saved it somewhere outside Microsoft 365.
2. Select Continue with Veeam. Don't select Continue with Microsoft, because that sends you to the Microsoft Entra sign-in page, which may be down.
3. On the Sign in to Veeam page, enter your Veeam My Account email address and password, then complete MFA. If the authenticator is down, use the recovery codes.
4. If your account belongs to more than one Veeam Data Cloud organization, pick one on the Choose an Organization page and click Proceed.
5. Open the Microsoft 365 or Entra ID workload you need.

Veeam Data Cloud signs you out after 30 minutes of inactivity and warns you two minutes before it does (Accessing Veeam Data Cloud). Before you start, check the Veeam status page to see whether the incident affects Veeam Data Cloud too.

During an outage, compare Entra ID restore points against each other. The default comparison is against live production, which Veeam Data Cloud has to read from Entra ID, so it may fail while Entra ID is down.

When someone needs an email or a file now, use Download. Download doesn't write anything back to Microsoft 365, so it works while Microsoft is down (Obtaining Downloaded Items):

1. In Flex Restore or in search results, select the mailboxes, folders, emails, files or Teams items you need.
2. Click Download. The job runs in the background.
3. When Veeam Data Cloud notifies you, open Notifications, click the restore session, then click Download File.

Mailboxes download as .PST files, split into chunks of up to 10 GB each and zipped together. A 36 GB mailbox, for example, comes as four .PST files. A single OneDrive or SharePoint download can be at most 200 GB.

Some actions have to wait until Microsoft is back, because they write to or read from your live tenant:

• Restoring to the original or another Microsoft 365 location
• Express Restore (Premium plan)
• Comparing an email or Entra ID object with production
• Restoring Entra ID objects or properties
• New backup runs