The continuing outage of Microsoft’s collaboration tools will have a “cascading” effect on businesses, with the financial impact increasing the longer it stretches, an expert has said.
Microsoft 365 tools Exchange Online and Outlook were affected, with Teams, SharePoint Online, Copilot also likely to be affected by the interruption that began on Thursday. The company is still working on fixing it. It has not provided details about the cause.
“The ongoing outage of Microsoft’s collaboration tools, especially emails and scheduling, will not only impact communications, but also have a cascading impact on decision-making, revenue and service delivery,” said Saurabh Verma, vice president, ICT growth advisory at consultancy Frost & Sullivan.
“The actual dollar impact or revenue loss would go up with every passing minute, as millions of organisations across critical and non-critical sectors are deeply embedded with MS 365 suite.”
Microsoft's outage reports on November 12 reached 74 countries and territories in about an hour on Downdetector, which monitors internet disruption.
The outage may also affect software as a service (SaaS) tools using MS’s 365 application programming interface (APIs), which refers to rules that allow software apps to communicate, Mr Verma said.
“With MS having a significant market share in collab tools, there is no escaping and second solution to it. No product in today’s age and time is immune to such outages,” he added.
Technology disruptions have been common in recent years, as digital usage continues to soar.
In October last year, Microsoft's Azure portal went down, affecting hundreds of thousands of people trying to access apps, games, websites and other services.
That came in the same month that an outage of Amazon Web Services, which lasted for about 15 hours, disrupted several AWS-hosted services and platforms.
In June this year, several web platforms, apps and internet services including X, Zoom, Reddit, Canva, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Teams, Fortnite and Discord also experienced significant disruption.
