Massive Microsoft outages this week

marketing14560
2 hours ago
2 min read

Happy Friday

Last week it was Verizon, this week it's Microsoft. I'm talking about massive outages that ground business to a halt around the globe.

It all started Wednesday at around 8am HST, when thousands began reporting that they couldn't send or receive emails, search OneDrive or SharePoint, access service portals like as Microsoft Admin Center and Purview or use Teams whatsoever. The outage lasted around 4 hours and Microsoft stated vaguely that it was because of "backend infrastructure issues" - whatever that means.

Then yesterday the big one hit. Massive global outages disrupted access to email, Teams, and other services, halting business operations worldwide due to an Azure infrastructure issue. Over 5,000 reports per hour came in starting at 1:40am HST and lasted all day long.

The Takeaway

These outages created a ripple effect, paralyzing productivity worldwide. It's been organized chaos, with employees resorting to personal email accounts and alternative communication tools like Slack, Zoom and WhatsApp to keep operations afloat.

These events are not isolated but fit into a pattern of disruptions that have plagued Microsoft, Amazon and Google over the years. Simply put, we all depend of the Internet to be up 100% of the time or the world stops and the cloud infrastructure we're using is reaching capacity and starting to get old. As Microsoft and other expand their cloud empires, the complexity of their ecosystems increases the risk of such failures.

The lesson? Be prepared for this to happen again. How? In my opinion this is the simplest way and it's been one our secrets to success here at Cypac: playbooks.

Every sports team has them - does yours? Put together short, boring, pre-approved playbooks like:

“If Microsoft 365 is unavailable for >30 minutes, do the following…”

“If phones are down, customer-facing staff will…”

“If internet is down, switch over to...”

Keep it to 1 page. Outages hurt the worst when people don’t know what decisions they’re allowed to make, so include who is allowed to make them. Make sure they're written in plan English so that it makes sense to panicked readers.

Stay safe out there.

-Attila

PS. We were also affected by the global outage so please accept my apologies if there was a delay in replying to your email.

New Friday Funnies!

My internet went down last night, so I spent time with my family.

They seem like good people.

What did our parents do to kill boredom before the internet?

I asked my 18 brothers and sisters and they didn't know either.

If the Internet had a boat, where would it be parked?

In Google Docs.

If cows don’t have internet, how do they order things?

From a cattle log.