What the Microsoft Outlook outage reveals about risks, limitations and gaps in communication

Detailed summary

"Modern society has become highly dependent on a small number of major cloud and technology providers," says one expert.

"Modern society has become highly dependent on a small number of major cloud and technology providers," says one expert.

SINGAPORE: The global Microsoft Outlook outage on Friday (Nov 13) highlighted the risks that can arise when many organisations depend on the same technology providers for critical functions, experts said.

Professor Boh Wai Fong from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) said companies have gravitated towards these vendors because of the efficiency, economies of scale and integration.

But such decisions also tend to result in an over-reliance on a single vendor. A major failure can then have ripple effects across the world.

Prof Boh described this as a "paradox of digital transformation", where what may be optimal for an organisation may not necessarily be best for the entire ecosystem.

Mr Matthew Hardman, Asia-Pacific chief technology officer at Hitachi Vantara and a former Microsoft executive, said organisations have to plan for disruptions even when the underlying failure was outside their control.

"You can't outsource risk," he said. "Risk is something you have to own as an organisation."

The global Microsoft 365 outage on Friday disrupted services including Outlook, Teams and Copilot for more than half a day, affecting thousands of users and spilling into Asia-Pacific business hours.

Microsoft initially attributed the connectivity problems to an "elevated load" across its infrastructure, but later said this was caused by servers unexpectedly becoming unavailable, shifting demand onto those still operating.

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