Commentary: Microsoft discovers AI can’t keep the email going

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The outages of Outlook, Teams, Copilot and more than a dozen services are a bad look for the tech giant and its AI layoffs, says Mark Gongloff for Bloomberg Opinion.

The outages of Outlook, Teams, Copilot and more than a dozen services are a bad look for the tech giant and its AI layoffs, says Mark Gongloff for Bloomberg Opinion.

NEW YORK: We’ve all been there: Your WiFi is down and you need a human to fix it, but first you have to run the gauntlet of the cable company’s dimwitted AI robots to access one.

Now imagine you’re a US$4 trillion company and the entire planet needs your computer problems fixed, like, yesterday, but you’ve sacrificed a third of your human employees to AI.

As of Friday morning (Nov 13, US time), Microsoft had still not completely repaired outages of its Outlook, Teams, AI assistant Copilot and more than a dozen other services that began nearly a day earlier. The outage wasn’t caused by Russian or North Korean hackers but by plain old bad code, “a core process” that apparently got performance anxiety and curled up into a ball, sobbing, on the server room floor. Other code collapsed in sympathy, and the company’s engineers hadn’t yet fully coaxed them back to health.

Eighteen hours later, the best this massive company, supposedly near the pointy end of the AI spear, could say was that things were looking up. Unless you were in Asia, where there were merely “encouraging recovery signals.” That will be slim comfort to the governments of Japan, Australia, the Philippines and several other countries who were still unable to serve their citizens because they could not get into their Outlook.

About 450 million customers around the world pay good money for Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including governments, public services and other massive corporations. Many of their employees have spent the past day celebrating a forced vacation from Outlook, Teams and other unloved work tools and reflecting on the positives of competitors such as Slack and Zoom.

Microsoft 365 customers also include the AI companies, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, upon which the global economy depends these days.

That’s ironic, because Microsoft’s…

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