Good morning, TSFers! If this post was an email, it likely wouldn’t be reaching you today. Microsoft products (Outlook, Teams, etc.) were down for folks around the world yesterday and are still down. The inability to do most digital tasks strikes me as an excellent reason to take an unexpected three-day weekend. Were you affected?
Most of my fiance’s coworkers were down, but for some reason, she was connected to one of the few unaffected servers or somehow on the system not impacted. So her day consisted
of people sending her emails over chat for her to send to outside recipients. She was the conduit. But, like, what was the point of sending all those emails if most of the world was down? The recipients likely weren’t getting them!
We ran into one of our neighbors on the morning dog walk who said that whenever everything goes down, her first thought is “this is it, the cyberattack / AI takeover that cripples everything” and told us about her plans to become a hairdresser when the digital world goes poof. Thanks, friend. “This is it, it’s all over” will now be my first thought when there is a mass outage, too.
On a lighter note, the still-functioning parts of the internet are having their fun. I’ve seen suggestions that this is Clippy’s revenge for Microsoft’s neglect. One of my go-to’s is “who forgot to feed the hamsters whose wheels power everything?” Or maybe it was the Mauricio Pochettino to Manchester United news that broke the internet. It probably wasn’t that.
What’s your explanation for why Microsoft broke? Wrong answers only.
