One signal

Some UK schools and councils have told people to phone instead during the Microsoft outage, and some NHS staff have been locked out of email, the Mirror reports, citing University of Reading computer science professor James Ferryman.

Ferryman said Microsoft had reported no sign of a cyberattack, while the cause of the disruption remained unclear. The Register separately reported that Microsoft was seeing recovery progress across regions, though some users could still face intermittent access or delayed email. For organisations relying on Microsoft 365, the practical test is not just whether services return, but whether essential work has a backup route when they do not.

Discuss: Should public services be required to maintain non-email backup routes for outages like this, even if they add cost and complexity?

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