![[Commentary] Microsoft's large-scale failure makes us keenly aware of our dependence on technology](/api/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fichef.bbci.co.uk%2Face%2Fws%2F240%2Fcpsprodpb%2F7bb3%2Flive%2F3e9f8480-dfcc-11f1-b441-2b33b063138f.jpg)
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Laura Kress Technology Reporter
A large-scale outage that lasted more than 22 hours for some Microsoft (MS) services has highlighted and raised questions about the extent to which services essential to daily life depend on a small number of large technology companies.
The large-scale outage affected various services provided by Microsoft 365, including the email service Outlook. The cause was that some servers were disconnected due to periodic automated checks, and traffic was concentrated on the remaining servers that were still running.
Engineers restored service in stages, which took almost a full day. The failure highlighted just how deeply ingrained Microsoft's services are in modern society.
Flora Hamilton, executive director of the UK's Small Business Charter, said the outage was a "hard-hitting reminder" of how reliant businesses are on "digital systems" such as Microsoft's Outlook to keep their operations running.
"For many small and medium-sized businesses, email connectivity is fundamental to everything from communicating with customers and business partners to generating revenue," said Hamilton.
Approximately 430 million people in over 70 countries affected
The disruption affected not only businesses, but also organizations and public institutions around the world.
Microsoft 365 is used by about 430 million people worldwide, and issues were reported in more than 70 countries.
The impact of the outage was widespread, knocking out email systems in the US House of Representatives and Australia's intelligence agencies. Singapore's court system and Indian airline customer service centers were also disrupted.
Microsoft later apologized for the issue and said it was due to a technical glitch, not a cyberattack.
The company added in a statement late Thursday that it does not have an estimate of when service will be fully restored.
AI strategist Walter Pascarelli told the BBC that the failure "understood the vulnerabilities and dependencies" of governments, businesses and critical infrastructure. "In the future, if AI assistants begin to interact with email, calendars, and files, the impact of failures like this one could become even more widespread."
The time it took to recover was “unprecedented”
Gergely Oros, who led software engineering at several large technology companies, explained that this type of failure is not unprecedented. However, he noted that the length of time Microsoft took to recover was unusual.
A Microsoft spokesperson said the company was restoring services in stages, "considering the scale of demand."
"As a result, it took a long time (for restoration work), but it led to a stable recovery."
Mr. Orosz said the disruption caused by the failure revealed "how dependent we are on a small number of large American companies."
Orosz said that future measures could include dividing services by region to reduce the impact of outages. This method has already been implemented in Amazon's cloud service, Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Microsoft is currently investigating the cause of the failure and is expected to take measures based on the findings to prevent a similar incident from happening again.
(English article Microsoft outage 'stark reminder' of how much we rely on tech)
