I have no specific insight into the Microsoft outage. But if you look at the fact that Microsoft is reducing its workforce and increasing investment in AI, it is not a massive leap to assume that the pace of delivery, driven by heavy automation with agents, could well be why Microsoft had no idea what was happening and has taken more than 20 hours to back out of it.
For some people it just means a day off and more emails to delete on Monday. For others it will be much more significant, hospital results or appointments will have been delayed - with varying degrees of severity, businesses will have lost revenue and smaller businesses are already suffering from a challenging economic climate.
This news comes at a time when single large scale providers operating critical infrastructure is being called into question, especially when they are US based firms and the idea of digital sovereignty is on many tech leaders minds. For Microsoft - who announced they they are effectively increasing their prices, now is not a good time for such a wide-ranging and long-running outage.
