Hatch:

 

I should preface this by saying I don't think our IT guy is very on to it, he's a friend of the business owner.

 

We dont know on what basis the IT guy is doing the admin.
Could be, a freebee for a friend.
Could be, management simply WILL NOT pay what it takes to have the server/network admin(ongoing) done properly
Could be, the whole system is just a flaky nightmare & IT guy is just helping out , for a friend, as best he can .

So lets not blame the IT guy, when we dont know the back story to this.
management may not have cared about 1 days email & told him just do it .

having printers & email offline at the same time : could be alot more to the story than you/we know about. Perhaps the whole
system is just held together with bits of string.
Plenty of companies have systems that belong in the dump, and wont spend untill it actually dies, terminally (Ive come across that a few times)

Hatch:

 

We had an issue a few months ago when our emails went down again because our server spam folder was too full so the server stopped being able to receive emails (this is what we were told at the time).

 

Sometimes you just tell staff some white lies that are easier for them to understand . Rather than a 5 minute tech explanation
More likely , if the real reason was because the whole system is a unmanaged ~Turd~ , thats something IT would never be telling staff .