Microsoft Outlook outage hits 70+ countries for about 19 hours (opens the source in a new tab)
- A Microsoft network upgrade went wrong and took Outlook email offline for about 19 hours, the WSJ reports. Microsoft says it was not hacked.
- The FT says users in more than 70 countries were hit, from Goldman Sachs to NHS staff on paper records and a Colorado sheriff asking for bail in cash. Some workers treated it as a snow day; one built bookshelves.
- WIRED says officials, including the chair of a UK parliamentary committee, called for less reliance on tech giants, as France and others build local alternatives to US software.
- 19 hrs
- email down (WSJ)
- 70+
- countries hit (FT)
Why it matters A handful of cloud providers now carry much of the world's daily work, so one bad upgrade becomes a global event. Know which tasks stop when email does, and keep a phone list and offline fallback ready.
Other side Long outages are rare against years of steady uptime, and home-grown alternatives may fail more often. As a security expert told WIRED, the fix is an independent fallback for truly critical services, not quitting big providers.
Also read: The Microsoft Outage Is a Warning for the World (WIRED)