TechCrunch:
What began as an Outlook email and Teams video conferencing outage soon developed into a full blown meltdown, affecting the company’s cloud services for both consumer and business email, files, and documents. The outage also knocked out the company’s Copilot AI tools, Defender security screening software, and prevented system administrators from accessing their internal Intune dashboards and features. Some users reportedly experienced issues with accessing their cloud-based Windows computers.
This is a long outage.
Companies built on Microsoft tools — of which there are, of course, many! — are kind of dead in the water. Without Outlook and Teams, communication gets pretty limited pretty quickly. Especially as an increasing number of folks are hesitant to, you know, call people.
Email preferences — even professional email — are personal. Anytime I had a job at a Microsoft-based shop, I was bummed: I feel less productive when I don’t have the power of Gmail behind me.
This outage is, obviously, a nightmare for people at Microsoft. I expect they’ll eventually share a reasonably forthcoming postmortem on what went wrong and what steps were taken to prevent this from happening again.
One day off from work because of a communications snow day is fun. Two days is… yikes.
