Microsoft Outlook outage: perils of relying on big tech

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“I hope this email finds you well.” It apparently has not. Filipinos woke up today to an outage of Microsoft cloud services including Microsoft Outlook, MS Teams, and Office 365,…

Filipinos woke up today to an outage of Microsoft cloud services including Microsoft Outlook, MS Teams, and Office 365, the premiere suite for the backbone of most global enterprises across different industries. It has been more than 12 hours since the outage and Microsoft has still not found a solution to the problem.

The underlying cause of the outage was an elevated load that servers across the globe could not handle. The initial findings however do not equate this to a coordinated DDOS attack from hackers. In layman’s terms, Microsoft has an internal software audit that checks servers for problems and segregates them offline for servicing. That health check has apparently failed.

Asked for comment, Microsoft has directed us to a statement from Charles Lamanna, EVP of Copilot, Agents, and Platform at Microsoft:

We regret that today’s outages caused disruptions for our customers, and we are working to address the issue. We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now I can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious or cyber activity.

This outage has raised questions about how the world has heavily relied on big tech to keep the world working the way it is. From airport ticket tracking, medical database management, to everyday corporate emails, an outage like this sparks the question: are we relying too much on big tech? It’s a realization that the world of 8.2 billion people rely on a few tech companies for everything. When those fail, the world stops.

مطلع المقال، مقتطف من Philippine Daily Inquirer. لقراءة المقال كاملًا، افتحه على موقع الناشر.