At noon on Oct. 29, the cloud-based subscription service Microsoft 365 experienced major outages across the country, causing a massive inconvenience for customers. Stockbrokers and Microsoft as a whole saw stock plummet, with the company losing around seven billion dollars in the outage.
Microsoft, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, is one of the biggest tech juggernauts in the world. The company develops and markets a wide range of software, service and hardware.You likely already know some of Microsoft’s platforms, such as Microsoft Windows or Xbox.
Microsoft created Microsoft 365 as a subscription service where the customer can access premium sites like Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Word and Teams. You can access these apps for free, but with limited access to certain features. Microsoft 365 offers the full package where you can access everything without limitations.
On Oct. 29, Azure Front Door, the cloud computing platform that Microsoft 365 uses to store these apps and keep them running at all times, had a global outage. Millions of users were left confused and frustrated during the outage, which led to hundreds of thousands of complaints getting to Microsoft’s inbox. Azure crashed due to an unintentional change to the configuration of the program that was made by Microsoft’s IT workers.
This outraged users and led to immense backlash from Microsoft and Bill Gates even though Gates had nothing to do with the IT workers’ configuration change. The hate Microsoft received led to immediate repairs to Azure’s mainframe, which took eight hours. At 8:00 p.m., exactly eight hours after the initial outage, Microsoft 365 came back online, ending the outage.
The outage only lasted eight hours, but those hours sabotaged Microsoft and their customers’ plans for that day. Reports say that the outages backed up dozens of other companies from their work due to the lack of PowerPoint interfering with their scheduled presentations.
Though the outage has ended, many people remain affected, with billions of dollars having been lost and eight whole hours in the dark having ruined customers’ week. No one knows yet just how long it will take for them to get back on pace, which shows how devastating the outage truly was.
