Thousands of users reported problems with Microsoft services on Tuesday morning, and the US company later confirmed the failure itself. A mistake in the network configuration is likely to have led to the difficulties – the change was reversed in the late morning, and e-mails were trickling in again in many offices, and nothing stood in the way of video conferences via teams.
A whole handful of Microsoft services were affected, whether the cloud storage service OneDrive, Exchange or SharePoint. The game “Minecraft”, which is perhaps less important for work in the office, also temporarily refused to work.
Rapid rise for teams and Co.
Teams, which offers chat functions in addition to video meetings like its competitor Slack, is now used by around 280 million people. Before the pandemic began, such user numbers would have been unthinkable – but everyday office life has changed permanently. After morning coffee, many a path leads to a video conference, whether from home or in the office.
A few names have become very central: In addition to Microsoft, Google is involved here, Zoom was even used synonymously for video conferences during the pandemic, Slack and, last but not least, Facebook shape everyday office life. What they all have in common is that most of their services run in the cloud – in data centers distributed around the world, but not directly at the customers.
Cloud as a fragile framework
Many companies see this as a relief: They don’t have to operate their own servers, and the associated acquisition costs are eliminated – instead, the software giants are paid monthly for operation. Conversely, this also means that if the cloud fails, not just one company goes offline, but many companies at once.
The Reuters news agency reported on Tuesday, for example, that companies such as Bayer and BASF were temporarily unavailable. And it’s not the first time since the beginning of the pandemic that the cloud has failed – and that work has stopped worldwide. Technical glitches at providers like Amazon paralyzed countless services worldwide.
Boom of the tech giants with the home office
On the economic side, the changed working reality led to a boom. Many companies have “spent like rock stars in the 1980s” over the past few years, analyst Dan Ives told Reuters. Jobs were needed at home, as were cloud computing and other services. But in recent weeks, virtually all major tech companies have often fired thousands of their employees.
In the meantime, demand has fallen sharply again, and rising inflation and the looming recession are also causing problems for the technology industry. Because the tech giants usually put a lot of money into projects that sometimes don’t pay off for years.
Pick up the phone as a last resort
What can also be observed after the failure on Tuesday: Apparently nobody really missed the video conferencing tool. Countless postings were found on social networks in a very short time, which were rather relieved about the forced break.
Only the camp of those employees who claim that some meetings would have been better via email had no reason to be happy on Tuesday – after all, email traffic was also paralyzed. For many, the last resort was to pick up the phone.
