The global chaos caused by Microsoft’s blackout lasted more than twenty-four hours, plunging 74 countries into digital “darkness.” Government agencies, businesses, organizations, healthcare systems in general, entire governments, and even intelligence agencies lost all access and were temporarily paralyzed due to the inability to access Microsoft systems—primarily Teams, Outlook, and Copilot.
Microsoft-X
“We have completed our efforts to address the root cause of the incident and have restored service for the remaining customers and regions that were affected.”
ΣΧΕΤΙΚΑ ΑΡΘΡΑ
The company ruled out the worst-case scenario—that the outage was caused by a cyberattack, malicious activity, or actions by artificial intelligence agents, and attributed the problem to a technical issue with the servers.
READ ALSO: Microsoft: The global blackout comes at a heavy cost, with estimated insured losses of up to $500 million | AlphaNews
“The company has acknowledged the problem as a technical failure in an upgrade performed at a central point, resulting in the upgrade not functioning properly and the entire network going down, with the consequences we’ve seen in recent days. In an attempt to fix the problem, other issues arose, and so it took until today, November 14, to resolve the issue.”
Dinos Pastos – Cybersecurity Expert
Via… fax
Many employees were happy about the outage of Teams and Outlook, since they couldn’t work, while others went so far as to dust off old methods, such as fax machines and landlines.
“And so, quite literally, millions of people are left with their hands tied, waiting for service to be restored or trying to find workarounds—perhaps through text messages or personal email accounts.”
Charmi Levy – Technology Analyst and Journalist
It’s important to have a Plan B, explains cybersecurity expert Dinos Pastos, especially when companies use the so-called “cloud” for data storage, running applications, and accessing them from anywhere.
“Companies certainly benefit greatly from using cloud services, but at the same time, they rely on third parties to maintain continuity and resolve issues. It’s not that simple to switch from one service to another within a matter of hours. We don’t view this as an isolated incident; it’s something that can happen at any time and to any service—even to the industry giants, as we’ve seen with Microsoft.”
Dinos Pastos – Cybersecurity Expert
He clarifies that methods such as fax have now been phased out and are unlikely to return as an alternative.
Watch the report by Kleio Vourkou:
