FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE DAY MICROSOFT STOPPED WORKING
On Friday the 13th, millions of people around the world experienced a technological nightmare when a major global outage disrupted Microsoft's services, leaving businesses, government agencies and individuals struggling to carry out their daily activities. The disruption began on Thursday evening, 12 November, and continued into Friday. Some of Microsoft's most widely used services, including Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Copilot and other Microsoft 365 applications, became inaccessible or unreliable. Users reported being unable to send or receive emails, access important documents, join online meetings or communicate with colleagues. The problem affected users in at least 74 countries and territories. At its peak, nearly 140,000 problems were reported with Outlook alone on Downdetector, a website that monitors service interruptions. The actual number of people affected was considerably higher. Microsoft initially struggled to identify and resolve the problem. Some servers that had...