00:00Imagine arriving at the office and finding that your email, chat, and shared files won't open.
00:04That happened on Thursday to millions of people in more than 70 countries.
00:08And on Friday the problem continues.
00:10What happened?
00:11On the afternoon of Thursday, November 12, Microsoft began reporting problems with Outlook.
00:16particularly in Exchange Online mailboxes.
00:20The problems quickly spread to Teams,
00:23to its artificial intelligence tool Copilot
00:25and other services in the Microsoft 365 suite,
00:28The same one that includes Word and Excel.
00:30According to DownDetector, hundreds of thousands of complaints were registered.
00:34The company explained that a central process on the affected servers was becoming overloaded.
00:39That caused them to stop responding and the capacity to be lost.
00:42And she was emphatic about one thing: there is no evidence of malicious activity.
00:46To solve this, he paused the deployments,
00:49It diverted traffic away from the affected infrastructure and restarted the servers.
00:52On Friday he said he saw positive signs of stability, with progress especially in Asia,
00:57although the service was not yet fully normalized globally.
01:00What is unusual is the duration of the failures.
01:02Previous crashes had rarely lasted more than a few hours,
01:06However, it's worth clarifying that not all users experienced failures or failures of the same intensity.
01:10Who did he hit?
01:11Businesses were the first to feel it.
01:13Richmond, the Swiss luxury group, and the American manufacturer Workhorse
01:17They had to postpone the publication of their results.
01:20In the United Kingdom, the health system rescheduled some procedures
01:23and several local police forces were unable to receive online complaints.
01:27Japan's Ministry of Finance went almost an entire day without receiving any mail.
01:31To inform journalists, he put up notices on paper.
01:33Visa processing has been suspended in New Zealand.
01:36and the Euronext exchange reported that its emails were unavailable.
01:40Microsoft's stock had fallen nearly 2% before the opening bell on Friday.
01:45Why does it matter?
01:46Outlook was launched in 1997 and has been around since Microsoft shut down Hotmail in 2013.
01:50It established itself as the quintessential corporate email service.
01:53Today it is used by about 75% of the companies on the Fortune 500 list.
01:58That's the key.
01:59When so many organizations depend on the same supplier,
02:02A failure doesn't stay within one company.
02:04This is not the first time this has happened in the corporate world
02:07And it probably won't be the last one either.
02:09A 15-hour outage at Amazon Web Services last year
02:13It affected hundreds of websites.
02:15And a faulty CrowdStrike update in 2024
02:18It grounded flights around the world.
02:21A cybersecurity expert summed it up like this.
02:23The technology market is concentrated in a few providers.
02:26and we take those services for granted.
02:29The question this outage leaves is not just when Outlook will return.
02:32How prepared are we when the tool fails?
02:35on which everything else depends.
02:46Thank you!
02:46Thank you!
02:46Thank you!
02:46Thank you!
02:47Thank you!
