With cutting-edge technologies from decades ago—such as telephones, fax machines, and even Bluetooth—companies around the world were forced to resort to these technologies in an effort to mitigate the impact of the problems that arose with Microsoft’s operations, as one of the applications that “crashed” was Outlook, leaving millions of users without access to their email.
The prolonged outage, which also affected the company’s Teams and Copilot services, impacted some of the world’s largest organizations: from banking institutions and brokerage firms to shipping companies.
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Although most reported that their core systems remained operational, transactions and administrative tasks were slowed in some cases. This serves as yet another reminder of just how much of global trade, public services, and communications depend on a handful of technology providers.
“Pressure is mounting to invest in contingency plans, as well as to test the effectiveness of backup systems in case they are needed,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore, adding that companies must partner with more than one provider for critical services, such as communications and data storage.
Microsoft’s explanation for the outage
Microsoft—which states on its website that more than 430 million people use its 365 suite of services —attributed the problem to server malfunctions and clarified that there is no evidence of malicious activity.
This outage comes just a few weeks after attacks on industrial food-cooling systems in supermarkets, highlighting how a single point of failure —whether a technical error, a cyberattack, or even extreme weather events—can disrupt daily business operations.
In its latest update on Friday (Nov. 13), Microsoft reported that there are signs of stabilization, as corrective measures have been implemented on a broader scale, with the goal of fully restoring services.
“Pick up the phone”
The extent of the problem was revealed by the fact that the European stock exchange operator Euronext—which operates stock exchanges in Paris, Brussels, Lisbon, Amsterdam, Oslo, Athens, and Milan—called on listed companies to contact them by phone.
“We have ensured that the team has sufficient capacity to manage the situation and the additional workload,” said a spokesperson, adding that Euronext is verifying the callers’ identities to ensure the confidentiality and integrity of the information.
Aviva, which announced its financial results on Friday, stated that it had implemented contingency plans. These included providing alternative phone numbers for the earnings call, as well as using Bluetooth technology to transfer audio recordings, since email was down.
The British insurance company had conducted a test for an outage of a similar scale in its most critical technology systems about two weeks ago, as CEO Amanda Blank told Reuters.
For its part, the Maersk shipping group asked its customers to contact them by phone for any urgent matters, while urging them to confirm with their local representative the authenticity of any unexpected communication regarding the system outage.
Back to faxes
In Taiwan, the system outage caused problems with fund management at brokerage firms, life insurance companies, and investment fund firms, according to people familiar with the situation.
At another financial firm, transactions such as the purchase and sale of short-term securities—which under normal circumstances are confirmed via email—had to be confirmed via fax, one of the sources said.
Foreign banks and financial institutions in Taiwan were particularly hard hit, said a trader, as much of their data is sent via email to their overseas headquarters using Microsoft systems.
In Britain, HSBC and Barclays activated internal incident response teams to assess the impact, sources within the banks told Reuters.
Although email systems were down, most customer services were unaffected.
HSBC reminded its staff not to use unauthorized communication channels, such as personal email or WhatsApp, to work around the problem, one of the sources said.
Two financial industry professionals said they observed lower trading volumes in certain markets on Friday, a fact they attributed to difficulties in executing trades.
Kaitlin Egen of Control Risks pointed out that, although large international companies typically have contingency plans in place, the sudden disruption of critical services served as a “wake-up call.”
“For many companies, this morning was likely chaotic as they tried to find a way to at least communicate with their employees,” she said.
Source: cnn.gr
