What A Stressful Start To The Day!

Hundreds of people have taken to social media to gripe after Microsoft services including Outlook and Teams suffered an outage.

The first issues were reported, with Microsoft saying that at about 9 am they isolated the problem to a networking configuration issue and were attempting to fix it without causing further impact to users.

They subsequently added that they have rolled back a change in their network that they thought was having an effect.

The situation left millions of people working from the office or their homes without access to emails, causing chaos for many, although the problem seemed to have been somewhat fixed before 9 am.

Twitter was loaded with complaints, with one person asking whether Outlook was down for everyone or were they the only one having a stressful start to the day.

Microsoft said on its status page and on Twitter at about 9.30 am that they’d rolled back a network change that they believed was causing the impact, and that they were observing the service as the rollback takes effect.

They said that they’d isolated the issue to a networking configuration problem and that they were investigating the best mitigation strategy to manage it without causing further impact, and that they would deliver more details once they had more information.

It had originally said just after 7.30 am that it was investigating the outage problems.

Microsoft 365 is the firm’s name for its array of programs and services, which also include Microsoft Office applications such as Word and Excel as well as the communication platform Teams.

Teams are used by almost 300 million people across the world, with numerous businesses and schools depending on them for calls, meetings and general organisation.

The firm said it had received reports that its OneDrive cloud storage facility, SharePoint Online service and Microsoft Graph were also having issues.

Jake Moore, a cyber security specialist, warned that the problem emphasises how businesses should be prepared and have contingency plans when critical programmes suffer outages.

He told a newspaper outlet that these outages were growing in volume due to the mere number of more online users and traffic, and said that many people were quick to suspect a cyberattack but this could often add to the chaos, and that it emphasised the importance of these services and the millions of people they serve.

For some, the worst start to their day was switching on their computer to discover that their email wasn’t working, especially when it’s part of their job, where they might have to coordinate a bunch of flights and logistical arrangements, all heavily reliant on email from people and live systems linked into Microsoft servers and data centres.

Some people couldn’t even pay for their goods by card because Microsoft was down, and we’re veering up to a cashless culture, well, this is a good way to go about it.

Remember when you just got used to Windows 95 and then had to upgrade or it would grind to a halt, and then all familiar buttons were moved all over the place by some techie at Microsoft? It was a bit like letting your ten-year-old rearrange your workshop.

Then came 1,000 patches over 2 years to try and coax it back into life, plus trojans to fight, worms and the dreaded blue screen et cetera. Now there’s no Outlook for an hour and snowflakes treat it like it’s armageddon. I wonder how the world would function now without DOS, Windows and Mac IOS?