It loads and loads and loads. This is how thousands, hundreds of thousands, probably millions of users of products from the US software manufacturer Microsoft feel today. A look at social media reveals: The failure of Microsoft’s infrastructure does not only affect Germany, users in the USA and India are also complaining about not bad performance and not being able to access e-mails.
Microsoft has already become aware of the problem. The Microsoft 365 status website states that the outage affects users of almost every application: Microsoft Teams, Exchange Online, Outlook, SharePoint Online, One Drive. It is a network problem. The support team announced via Twitter that they were trying to find a solution.
The Microsoft failure triggered some amusement on the short message platform. This is understandable, especially for users in the USA. Businesses there have little to fear. It’s late at night in the US right now. In Europe, on the other hand, the loss hits people at the beginning of core working hours. In thousands of companies where conferences are held remotely or hybrid, work is likely to stand still for the time being.
Just in time for the start of the working day in Germany
It is not particularly unusual for software services to fail worldwide. In June 2022, for example, a problem at web infrastructure provider Cloudflare threw hundreds of popular websites offline, including Shopify, Discord and Fitbit. Even messengers like Whatsapp or social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have to struggle with problems from time to time. However, it is unusual for Microsoft’s productivity services to fail completely worldwide.
The outage comes at a bad time for Microsoft. Regulators in the EU and the United States have recently repeatedly considered whether the company has not become too large and too powerful in some areas. There are few alternatives for productivity software, especially since Microsoft can make customers extremely attractive offers for complete solutions. In recent years, Microsoft has tried hard to lure customers into the cloud they operate instead of on-premises products. The danger of this is clearly shown by today’s failure: If everything runs via the Microsoft cloud in the future, then if this cloud fails, everything will also come to a standstill.