Microsoft outage gives customers a crash course in dependence on Redmond
Microsoft 365 services are slowly recovering from a prolonged outage that has handed critics of single-vendor dependence a particularly unwelcome case study.
Key points
- At 1401 GMT on November 13, Microsoft reported: "We're continuing to see improvements in service availability," but the damage has surely been done.
- Beyond any compensation claims, Microsoft may face awkward conversations about those dependencies when contracts come up for renewal.
- Microsoft 365 Education was affected (unfortunate, considering the changes the company has made), and so on.
For affected Microsoft customers, the disruption has offered an unwelcome preview.
"The real concern isn't that Microsoft has suffered an outage.
Additional details
- "When everything is hanging on a single vendor, companies can't switch providers quickly to get back up and running, or have a second setup as backup, or pull the plug when under attack and keep working air-gapped." Similarly, Civo CEO Mark Boost noted that IT whoopsies were a way of life.
- The list of problems in what Microsoft delicately called a "Service Degradation" is breathtaking.
- If the outage halted work at your organization, then questions will have to be asked.
- Although perhaps not so extreme as the measures overheard by one vulture in a German shared workspace: "Germany's love of the fax machine – we are finally getting our chance to shine!
- Viewing recently used files in the Microsoft 365 application was problematic.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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