Microsoft outage gives customers a crash course in dependence on Redmond

Rivals offer sympathy for stranded admins – and a reminder that putting all your eggs in one basket has consequences

Microsoft 365 services are slowly recovering from a prolonged outage that has handed critics of single-vendor dependence a particularly unwelcome case study.

Ever wondered what it would be like if your IT supplier abruptly pulled the plug? Perhaps the result of a mood swing by an unpredictable political leader? For affected Microsoft customers, the disruption has offered an unwelcome preview. Email? Gone. Messaging with Teams? Iffy. Collaboration? Nope.

The list of problems in what Microsoft delicately called a "Service Degradation" is breathtaking. The company put the incident's start at 1826 GMT on November 12. Exchange Online fell over. Viewing recently used files in the Microsoft 365 application was problematic. Copilot threw a wobbly. Microsoft 365 Education was affected (unfortunate, considering the changes the company has made), and so on.

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At 1401 GMT on November 13, Microsoft reported: "We're continuing to see improvements in service availability," but the damage has surely been done. If the outage halted work at your organization, then questions will have to be asked.

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Even Microsoft's rivals had some sympathy for the engineers and administrators dealing with the problems.

Jos Poortvliet, co-founder of Nextcloud, told The Register: "Mistakes happen in the IT industry. This holds true for companies of all sizes, including us. Our heart goes out to all the admins today.

"This incident shows how dependent organizations are on a single ecosystem. Especially in critical infrastructure, monopolies are increasing the risk of stalling businesses globally if an incident occurs.

"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. "Every technology provider will experience failures," he said. "The real concern isn't that Microsoft has suffered an outage. It's that we've allowed so much of our critical infrastructure to become concentrated in the hands of so few companies, creating enormous single points of failure."

Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, also commented: "The global Microsoft outage only serves to highlight once again the lack of resilience in the UK's digital infrastructure, and the dangers that this dependency can pose to our security, economy and public services."

This week, Microsoft warned users to treat its unsupported Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 as "permanently vulnerable." Moving to Exchange Online brings its own dependencies, however. Beyond any compensation claims, Microsoft may face awkward conversations about those dependencies when contracts come up for renewal.

And there are alternatives. 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! Our British colleagues cannot email; we have reverted to the natural way of the fax."