FAQ
Status: 01/25/2023 5:57 p.m
Numerous Microsoft services worldwide are down today. The office communication platform Teams or the e-mail service Microsoft could no longer be used. How dependent have companies become on the US tech giant?
What was the cause of the disruption?
According to the company, the global disruption in the services of the US group was triggered by an error in a change in the network configuration in Microsoft systems. As a result, services could not communicate with the cloud infrastructure or with each other. After the faulty update was reversed, the affected services gradually came back online in the late morning (CET). Microsoft itself did not disclose the number of users affected by the disruption, but data from the outage tracking website Downdetector showed thousands of incidents across all continents.
What role does Microsoft’s cloud play in the disruptions?
The extent of disruption is often magnified by the fact that the infrastructure for operating cloud services is heavily concentrated with a few large providers such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. However, such large-scale incidents are rather rare, says Volker Pfirsching, partner at the Arthur D. Little consulting firm. “The big services also keep a lot of backup resources available for this.”
However, it should be borne in mind that due to the interweaving of services, more complex disruptions can quickly occur, which can then affect all services, according to Pfirsching. Problems in Google’s cloud service in autumn 2021 also took the Spotify music service, the Snapchat photo platform and the Discord chat service offline. Disney+ and Netflix, for example, use the infrastructure of the cloud provider Amazon Web Services (AWS). And Microsoft’s cloud offerings such as Azure are not only based on the group’s in-house offerings, but also on many start-ups and large companies. According to the company, Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure has around 15 million corporate customers. In the event of an emergency, disturbances there should affect the majority of companies in Germany, Pfirsching suspects.
How big is Microsoft’s cloud?
A cloud is a type of external storage that resides on a remote server. This server is managed and maintained by the cloud provider. The data on the remote server can also be accessed from different devices at any time via the Internet – this is a major advantage of the cloud. Less storage space is therefore required on the local devices. The simple scalability is also a reason for many companies to opt for a cloud service.
According to a Bank of America estimate, Microsoft’s platform for cloud computing, Azure, had a market share of around 30 percent in 2022, ranking second behind the top dog Amazon Web Services (AWS). It is followed by Google’s cloud platform Despite the recently announced layoffs of 10,000 Microsoft employees due to clouded business prospects, the group’s cloud business is bubbling up. Revenue from the company’s Azure and other cloud services grew 31 percent last quarter. It has become Microsoft’s driving force, almost half of all sales now come from this area.
How many companies use Microsoft’s applications worldwide?
Microsoft’s online services include both the office communication platform Teams and Office products such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The number of users in teams shot up, especially during the peak phase of the corona pandemic. While 20 million people were still using teams worldwide in 2019, a year later it was 115 million. Its use has become indispensable in many offices. In 2022, the communication platform was used by 270 million people worldwide every month. This puts Teams far ahead of the competitor platform Slack.
Microsoft has been criticized from two directions. On the one hand, there is criticism that the US software giant has unfairly integrated its workplace chat app Teams into its Office product. There are also antitrust concerns in Microsoft’s cloud business, which are being examined. The German software provider NextCloud, the French OVHcloud and two other companies filed complaints about Microsoft’s cloud practices last year. The main issue here is unfair competitive conditions. The Gaia X project, a European cloud platform, is intended to reduce Europe’s dependence on the large US cloud providers in the long term.
How dependent are companies on Microsoft?
According to estimates by the marketing company Enlyft, Office products from Microsoft are used by more than three million companies. And Microsoft’s Windows still dominates the market for operating systems in Germany with a share of more than three quarters. Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi, Professor of Computer Science at the TU in Darmstadt, says: “Companies are very dependent on Microsoft services.” A distinction must be made as to whether the applications can be used independently of Microsoft servers or not. Larger companies usually use in-house servers, so they are basically dependent on Microsoft services, but independent of the Microsoft cloud.
How secure are the services and the infrastructure behind them?
There is no general answer to this question. More and more companies are using cloud-based services. That has to do with the maintenance and provision of security, “which have simply become too complex,” says IT expert Sadeghi. Large companies like Microsoft would have unattainable resources that also worked pre-emptively to improve security. For example, 3,500 cyber security experts worldwide are responsible for Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, and the company says that investments in security amount to more than one billion dollars a year.
According to Pfirsching, one’s own ability to act is typically “extremely limited” and one has to rely on Microsoft for troubleshooting. There are many possibilities for attack: the network infrastructure that ensures access to the cloud services, but also the user accounts of the users. The services of the large cloud providers are a welcome target per se, but are rarely really compromised. In principle, the services can be classified as secure.