Microsoft’s Response to Its Major Outage Is the 1 Thing No Company Should Ever Do

On Monday, Microsoft suffered a widespread outage that affected Outlook and Teams. Reports started appearing early Monday morning, and escalated throughout the day as more people showed up at work. It’s not entirely clear how many people were affected but there are more than 400 million Outlook users, according to Microsoft. The company acknowledged the outage, though it stopped short of explaining what happened. “We’ve identified a recent change which we believe has resulted in impact,” the company wrote in a post on X. “We’ve started to revert the change and are investigating what additional actions are required to mitigate the issue.” It’s not really clear what that even means. Nothing in that post, or the subsequent thread, explains what that change is, why it caused people to lose access to their email or messaging, or what exactly Microsoft is doing about it. It sounds like someone accidentally pushed the wrong button or somehow introduced a bug, which is a pretty bad look for one of the largest companies on Earth. On the one hand, I guess it’s good news that it wasn’t a breach or some kind of hack. Certainly, the email service that millions of businesses count on would be a valuable target for bad actors. There’s some consolation that all of those email accounts weren’t breached. On the other hand, it doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence if the primary form of communication for millions of workers can be brought down by something a company puts out intentionally. This is especially true after the Crowdstrike outage this summer when that company issued an update to its anti-malware software that caused a fatal error in Windows machines, causing them to be unable to boot. In that case, instead of losing access to email, the consequence included thousands of canceled flights, and hospitals reverting to paper charting when they couldn’t access computer systems. That’s probably worse, but it doesn’t change the fact that this is a bad look for Microsoft. At the same time, the company’s response made things objectively worse. Look, I get that IT and software professionals speak a different language when it comes to situations like this. The problem is, the people who are trying to do their job don’t care about the nuance of software bugs or unintentional downtime. They care about getting their work done. To be fair, most companies are really bad at handling this. For the most part that’s because they often don’t immediately know what caused the problem. It takes time to diagnose what went wrong, come up with a fix, and deploy it across a massive network of computers around the world. Then there’s the fact that companies are hesitant to be transparent about problems if it might make them look bad. What they often fail to understand is that being clear and transparent goes a long way, even when things are going wrong. Also, this is Microsoft, a $3 trillion company that makes the software that powers most of the world’s computers. This is the kind of thing that isn’t supposed to happen. And, when it does, you’d expect Microsoft—of all companies—to understand that it has to do better. That means explaining what happened. A lot of people work almost entirely out of their email. Even in the year 2024, it’s still a primary way of communication for hundreds of millions of people. If their email goes down, they deserve to know why, if for no other reason than they should be able to make an informed decision about whether or not they should find another option. People understand that downtime happens, but–in this case–Microsoft has had a hard time bringing its services back online, and it has had an even harder time talking about what happened. That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. The bottom line is that if you make a piece of software that millions of people depend on for their work, trust is your most valuable asset. And trust is a thing you earn through clear and transparent information. Anything less is the one thing no company should ever do. EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN