We may live in an age of messaging apps and artificial intelligence, but as about half a billion people discovered this week, good old-fashioned email is pretty important, too.
Starting around 12:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, a Microsoft cloud outage knocked the company's email and other services offline. The interruption left swaths of the globe, from healthcare systems to stock exchanges to members of U.K. Parliament, without one of their main tools for communicating. It was the tech world's equivalent of a snow day.
The cause was a server upgrade gone wrong, which then cascaded globally. It was a day reminiscent of the chaos caused in 2024 when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows systems.
Some users were frustrated. Some simply checked out from work. Others time-traveled back to the telephone era.
Support staff at Envision Technology Advisors, a technical services company, spent yesterday on the phone explaining to customers why their email wasn't working, said Stephen Rose, the company's chief technology officer.
Invision's customers began reaching out early in the day, but with email cut off, they had to turn to the telephone, Rose said. So they called. "Our service desk got totally paralyzed," he said.
Rose's team told callers that Envision wasn't to blame for the outage; Microsoft was. "You hope that it gets out by word of telephone," he said.
Email-deprived entities around the world encouraged customers to reach out via phone, including a water utility in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Detroit's light-rail system; and the East Gippsland region of Australia.
In the U.S., city governments across the country lost email, including Tampa, Fla.; Louisville, Ky.; and the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner. The House of Representatives was hit too. As was the shipping company Maersk and European exchange operator Euronext. In England, the National Health Service was among several government agencies affected by the outage.
The Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, a British publicly funded healthcare provider that specializes in mental health services, put out a press release with instructions for patients during the outage. "We would ask that if you need to make a referral today, or you are experiencing a crisis please call our services rather than email at this time," the statement said.
The outage affected a range of Microsoft 365 services, but it centered on Exchange Online and email services, Microsoft said.
Microsoft Teams, a messaging and video chat platform, remained up for many, prompting complaints. "Dear @ Microsoft - you shut down the wrong one. Please turn our email back on and kill Teams. Sincerely, Everyone," wrote Steve Schale, a political strategist based in Florida, on X.
For Jeffrey Michelson, a partner at an accounting firm based in New York City, the outage became a welcome chance to check a few items off his to-do list.
Michelson noticed he wasn't getting any new emails in his inbox in the early afternoon on Thursday. After dropping his daughter off at karate lessons just before sunset, he realized he might not be receiving emails for the rest of the evening.
So he got to work building two bookshelves that his wife had been asking him to complete for a month. "It was kind of nice, I'm not gonna lie," said Michelson. The next day, he woke up in the early morning to 70 unread emails.
Like any snow day, Thursday was fun for some but not so great for people who depended on Microsoft's cloud to get their work done. "Kids love a snow day," Envision's Rose said. "Parents go, 'Oh, my God, I've got these kids inside the house all day.' It's all a matter of perspective."
The outage was more disruptive for some than others. Workhorse Group, an industrial company based in the Detroit area, had to reschedule its third-quarter earnings call to the following week because of the outage.
"Our experience (clearly, like many others) shows how vital it is to have real-time communications, access to documents and the ability to share documents with others," said company spokesman John Williams. He sent his comment via text message.
A Microsoft spokesman said the company wasn't hacked. It was a network upgrade gone wrong, he said. "Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration," he said.
The blackout lasted about 19 hours, said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at the networking company Infoblox.
On X, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella was silent on the outage. That is not a complete surprise. "I'm an email typist," he told Bloomberg last year.
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