"Have you heard about Microsoft?" is not a question I get asked often in my everyday life. It's rare for anyone to ask me about Outlook, Teams, or OneDrive. But this week was an exception because of the major outage that affected Microsoft services.
With Outlook, Teams, Azure, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365 experiencing outages, I fielded quite a few questions about what's going on. I can't imagine what IT admins are going through right now.
By the time you read this, Microsoft will have likely fixed the issues that temporarily broke its services, but as I write this piece, the outage has been going on for nearly 24 hours. With an entire day of outages, many have joked online that the service should be renamed "Microsoft 364."
Beneath all the jokes about "Microsoft 364" was a reminder of just how much of the modern workplace runs on Microsoft's services. Most people don't spend much time thinking about Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, or Microsoft 365 when everything is working. They're just tools people expect to be there. But when those services go down, work doesn't just become inconvenient. In some cases, it grinds to a halt.
Biggest News of the Week
Microsoft's core services are experiencing a major outage, leaving users unable to access Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, Copilot, and more.
New Windows 11 wallpapers are reportedly on the way, signaling a broader refresh of the operating system.
Xbox services are beginning to be affected by Microsoft's ongoing global outage. Here's what you need to know about which Xbox services are currently having issues.
Commercial editions of Windows 11 version 23H2 have reached the end of support, with a final security update being released today.
Hopefully Microsoft uses this outage as an opportunity to strengthen its systems. The company is spending billions on AI, datacenters, and cloud infrastructure. That's hard to appreciate when people can't access their email, files, or meetings.
It's a shame that the Microsoft outage happened this week rather than next week. If Microsoft is going to have all of its major services fail and hurt the productivity of millions of people, the least the company could do is time the outage with the release of GTA VI. Logitech gave its employees a day off to enjoy GTA VI, but the rest of us have to use a vacation day or get sick at the right time.
Microsoft wants people talking about AI. This week, people were talking about Outlook and outages. That's probably not how the company hoped to end the week.
Shopping with Sean
Luckily for anyone shopping ahead of Black Friday, Windows Central and Future rely on Gmail, not Outlook. That means that all the emails about deals that were sent to our team this week arrived on time.
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