Microsoft 365 outage leaves admins stranded and rivals warning of single-vendor risk
Microsoft outage gives customers a crash course in dependence on Redmond
A prolonged Microsoft 365 outage that began on November 12 knocked out Exchange Online, Teams, Copilot, and more, with recovery still underway the next day. Rivals including Nextcloud and Civo offered sympathy to stranded admins while pointing to a deeper problem: critical infrastructure concentrated in too few hands creates enormous single points of failure. A UK parliamentary committee chair echoed the warning about resilience in digital infrastructure.
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.
- xtajv
Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited is designated as a DORA 3TPP [1]... I wonder if that corporate entity is in-scope to pay penalties for this outage.
---
[1] https://www.regulation-dora.eu/blog/critical-ict-third-party...
- onion2k
I wonder if it'll be a more useful course than the one we had when Crowdstrike broke everything, or the many times when AWS US-East-1 has fallen over taking down many popular services.
The lesson most people learn from this sort of outage is that things bounce back afterwards, and the risk is minimal enough that a day out of every few years isn't enough of a problem to pay more.
- oidar
I think every N days a chaos monkey event should happen for every business to help with this kind of issue. If a SaaS takes your business offline, you aren't resilient.
- ThrowawayR2
That ship sailed 20 years ago when everybody stampeded into cloud computing / SaaS ago and it became heresy to suggest on-prem had benefits. "Redmond" is a symptom but the problem is "live by the cloud, die by the cloud."
- pessimizer
When you're a monopoly, you don't have to worry about performance. Nobody is going anywhere, they'll just wait.