Microsoft acknowledged the recent disruption affecting hundreds of thousands of businesses and government agencies worldwide, including outages to Microsoft 365, Outlook and Teams services. The disruption started on November 12 and continues to impact customers.
Microsoft clarified the disruption was not attributable to a cyber-attack or an issue with AI. The disruption was related to an earlier network capacity upgrade which resulted in a fault which was not identified until a subsequent network change.
As a result, many of Microsoft’s services were unavailable to customers, and left them unable to access their e-mails and participate in virtual meetings.
The disruption to Microsoft’s services impacted customer’s ability to communicate with a range of airlines to book and/or change flights, even if a customer’s flight was not impacted. Other customers were unable to purchase flights. Some airlines contacted customers to notify them of disruption to their e-mail services.
Disruption to Microsoft’s services impacted other government, business and healthcare organizations.
In the interim, Microsoft took several measures to recover from the outage. These included redirecting traffic to unimpacted infrastructure and temporarily halting deployment and server restarts.
Extending the timeouts for email delivery to 48 hours was also intended to reduce the likelihood that emails delivered during the outage would be rejected.
Slowly but surely, services started returning to normal.
It is worth noting that there are few, if any, technology companies that are exempt from the consequences of infrastructure breakdown.
It is prudent for organizations to maintain multiple means of communication, and email and backup recovery systems, to ensure uninterrupted business operation.
Microsoft has expressed regret to the customers and stated that they will issue a detailed explanation on the root cause and the corrective and preventative steps they will be taking.
From this latest disruption to normal business operations, it has been demonstrated that while technology is great and can help implement great things in business, it is absolutely prudent and advisable to have continuous business operations that are not entirely dependent on one service provider, no matter how great that provider may seem to be.
