Around 4pm on Thursday, a lot of people’s emails stopped working.
Naturally, the abrupt absence of something that has become a vital part of the way our planet works and communicates caused an almost instant outburst of… happiness. And humour. Even relief.
Microsoft, the software behemoth behind much of the productivity software that runs the modern world, had a big problem.
According to its status pages, a “core process” that runs Microsoft 365, its software suite that runs email, collaboration, word processing and spreadsheets for workers across the world, was “becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding”. Seven hours later, it remained broken.
More than 450 million people in four million businesses use Microsoft 365, including its Outlook email software. Families, students, govnerment agencies, schools and corporations rely on it.
Though the outage came after work hours in the UK, it was still felt here – as well as in the US, and in Australia and Asia when the problem persisted for hours more into the next morning.
They instantly took to social media to complain.
“Learning from the Great Outlook Outage how much of my job is just sitting and replying to emails,” wrote one US worker.
Many joked that the product should be renamed Microsoft 364.
Some even used it as a marketing opportunity. “Need something to do while Outlook is down? You can always come to the library,” wrote Des Moines Public Library.
There was a serious side to the outage: the Washington State Department of Health asked people to contact them by phone if they had urgent issues and weren’t receiving replies by email.
But a very common theme was that life without email was an unexpected joy.
A Washington DC defence analyst commented “I haven’t felt this peaceful and serene in ages. Please do WhatsApp now”.
David Kaye, a former UN special rapporteur on the protection of the right to free speech, said “there’s a part of me that hopes Outlook is down forever”.
A US academic wrote: “People have been physically walking to each others’ offices to ‘chat’ and also frantically requesting their colleagues’ text numbers. 8 hours in, it’s been wild.”
The return of face-to-face interaction was celebrated: one user wrote “With the Oulook etc outage, the entire building is full of human emails, walking to the other side of the building to communicate. I meant to drop off a note on Lvl 4, and ran into everyone and their doggie along the way. It’s lovely. Let’s go back to analogue and them vacuum tubes for messages”.
Medical researcher Arrianna Planey said she was “honestly grateful” for the outage.
Mississippi English professor Dan Punday said “Are you guys all telling me I don’t need to check email after a whole day of teaching? What is this ‘outage’ and where can we get more?”
Microsoft’s own research has found that employees are interrupted, on average, every two minutes by meetings, emails and other pings from their software – when it’s working.
Yale historian Elaine Ayers noticed “I got so much work done today with Outlook being down, incredible”.
“Well work was useless thanks to Microsoft so I’m on episode 6 of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives: Orange County,” another user said.
A common reaction was to hope that the outage continued through Friday.
“Yeah, uh, Microsoft, if you could not fix Outlook and Teams until the weekend, that would be great”, said one. “Look, let’s just give Microsoft Friday to figure it out and we all get tomorrow off.”
In Australia, where the outage made Friday morning a write-off for many businesses, satirical site The Chaser put up a joke headline “‘Oh what a shame’ Microsoft outage means people can’t get work done on a Friday”.
Meanwhile in the UK, one social media comment read: “The only thing annoying me about the Outlook outage is that by the time I, a Brit, get to work tomorrow, it will be fixed”.
For many companies, Outlook is not just an email server but also manages calendars for business meetings and deadlines. Without Outlook and Teams, workers are also deprived of the channels they use to raise problems with managers, and managers can’t issue advice or instructions to staff.
The outage continued into the night: after midnight UK time Microsoft reported that servers it had thought it had gotten working again “can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic”.
Last month Microsoft announced a massive redundancy program, offering buyouts to 60,000 employees in the US, UK, Canada and India. Analysts linked the move to a cost squeeze caused by the need to invest in AI and data centre infrastructure.
It followed a decision in July to eliminate 4,800 jobs. The company denied that the roles were being replaced by AI, but admitted that “some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated”.
Another Microsoft redundancy round in April affected 7 per cent of its US workforce. Microsoft also laid off 9,000 workers last summer.
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