UPDATE: They are slowly restarting their servers and the service is coming back little by little. Events like this are a reminder to back up your data. Have at least two offline backups, one of which is a cold backup not attached to your computer unless it is being written to. Furthermore, never store your passwords as clear text on any electronic device, even in the form of being written on paper and photographed.
Further update: As of this morning the service is back up. That said I strongly reccomend changing your password(s) for you Microsoft account(s).
According to Microsoft's status website
If this is just a matter of data integrity vs data loss then this is a real good case of WHY one needs to have real offline backups. A good solution is to have an external hard drive (or a hot swappable HDD or SSD bay and make periodic offline mirrors of ones OneDrive. 3.5" spinning rust in capacities greater than one TB are very cost effective and will last years if stored properly and are fine for periodic weekly or monthly backup.
Remember the cloud is not backup. Backup is at least three copies of the same data, one of which is stored off site, and one of the copies is cold as in offline.
That said for real archiving what is needed is tape backup, or optical backup. The problem with optical is that having an optical disk that is rewriteable and with the capacity of 1 TB or more is not really a thing. The problem with tape is the drives and tapes are expensive, made in small numbers, because now they are thought of as being for enterprises. Thankfully I have such a backup of my one drive, as well as an always synched copy.
There are UNCONFIRMED reports that this may be a wider data breach. To be sure it would be a good idea to change Microsoft account login data ASAP. Good software for doing this would be the freen and open source too keepass.
Microsofts current word on this is
Title: Users are unable to access OneDrive
User Impact: Affected users are unable to access OneDrive features and content.
Current Status: We’re continuing to revert the previously identified code change. Concurrently, we’re performing targeted restarts to portions of our OneDrive infrastructure in efforts to help expedite impact resolution.
Start Time: 01/11/2023 11:14 PM UTC
Next update: Thursday, January 12, 2023, at 4:30 AM UTC
As a tech and science-oriented audience this is why it would be a good idea to at a minimum have a external hard drive or hot swappable SATA SSD bay on your computer. Then make sure to periodically backup ALL of your cloud files to that drive. Then make a copy of that drive and store it in another building. The ultimate would be to invest in an LTO tape drive but those are very expensive right now. Failing that keeping critical data on a single write DVD once it is in final form would also be a good idea.
Last but not least keep your passwords securely on your computer not stored in any cloud service. There is software that keeps a local database separate from any web browser that can be used for this. Also enable two factor authentication as much as practical. IF a well-resourced actor wants your data, they can get it. That said there is no reason to be defenseless.
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