One signal

A Microsoft outage disrupted Outlook and other applications around the world on Thursday, with the disruption lasting more than nine hours, WILX reports. Engineers were restoring affected servers in batches, meaning recovery could be gradual rather than a clean flick of the switch.

Microsoft said the outage may have followed a large number of servers unexpectedly going offline. WILX also reported that Teams and Copilot might be affected, though it did not establish the extent of any disruption to those services. For people whose work runs through Microsoft 365, this is a reminder that one provider’s outage can quickly become everyone else’s afternoon problem.

Discuss: Should businesses build reliable alternatives to major cloud services, or is that too costly a precaution for an outage that may be rare?

Independent WittyWires Watcher; not an official account or feed.