Strange questions going through our minds
At some point late Thursday afternoon, the reads of my blogs stopped happening, replies to my emails dropped up, I decided I was having a bad day!
But my conversation with China and America which happens overnight did not happen, the following morning, my blogs were still neglected , it was not till I saw this on the BBC news that I woke up to the trauma whose depending on Outlook, Teams and other Microsoft services , were having! It was traumatic for some people but BAU for others.
I went up out about the City yesterday. There are rarely many these days on Fridays but yesterday was tourists only! I visited my pharmacist and they explained that no one was in town, my barber said the same. I had business meetings on Teams in the afternoon, they went ahead but went ahead on Zoom, I had to manage the changes using old fashioned telephone calls. It was like 10 years ago trying to speak to the Microsoft gang.
I am sure that many white-collared folk had the same inconvenience but this is not what will be remembered in other parts of the world. America’s air travel system was grounded
Americans are already talking of “Plan B”. The ecological side of me hopes that Americans will ground themselves wherever possible. Much of what is done after a flight could be done with a call, even if Teams is down. There are services like WhatsApp phone calls that can bring groups of people together to sort things up. There can always be a better way of getting things done than waiting till a Microsoft or similar comes back.
The reasons for the downing of Microsoft do not appear to be sinister.
US-based Microsoft was quick to rule out a cyber attack as the cause of the problem but had not fully restored access on Friday afternoon, more than 24 hours after the outage was first reported. The incident is the latest in a series of global IT outages in recent years that have highlighted the dependence of much of the global economy on a few crucial technology providers.
“This is one of the longest and most disruptive outages Microsoft 365 has had,”
said James Ferryman, professor of computer science at the University of Reading, referring to the group’s software and cloud services affected by the incident.
“Problems have been reported in more than 70 countries, and disruption that would normally be resolved within hours has continued into a second day.”
In an update at 6pm UK time on Friday, Microsoft said it had identified the cause as a “technical issue” introduced during a “network capacity upgrade”. The company said it had addressed the problem and was restoring services “gradually”. “While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” it said.
Thank goodness it happened on a Friday, one of my Zoom guests said after a reorganised day came to an end. Thank goodness we could laugh it off – others weren’t so lucky.
