This is arguably one of the biggest outages in modern history. AWS region level outage was more visible, but email is a backbone of the modern world.

BBC is running live coverage of it at the level of government and ministers, feels surreal

I wonder whether this will help the already strengthening trend of some governments to unstick themselves from Microsoft (in particular their cloud).

I don't expect a fundamental shift but the boss having no access to his mails certainly seems like something I would bring up quite a bit.

Yeah I mean a lot of people are nonchalant about it here, but email for business is like telephones. Basic infrastructure that has an assumed near-zero downtime and expectations of fault tolerance.

It's such bedrock infrastructure that I've seen it used as fallback in the event of electronic trading infrastructure outage, brokers would accept specifically formatted emails as orders.

At this point it would probably be less impact to have phones go out globally because people would fallback to walking across the floor, using zoom/slack for simultaneous communication or email for more async.

Felt bad for the engineers that it had to happen on a Friday but for a multi day outage I guess it's a blessing in disguise.

Barring corona & year end holidays, this is probably the closest we can get to a global work holiday.

> ... but email is a backbone of the modern world

That's why most don't realize how big GMail is. Google has 1.8 billion GMail users, including a great many who are using their Google email professionally (no matter if it's a Google Workspace with their own domain or a redirection or just a plain GMail). Apple has 1 billion email users.

Microsoft 400 million and, granted, many businesses but it's not a fourth the number of email users GMail has.

And many, many, many people (real estate, delivery drivers, Uber and the likes) are using either Apple or GMail email from... Their phones.

It's a good thing it's only the "small" Microsoft email users base that is affected and not the 1.8 billion GMail users.

Who wants to bet that this is ultimately due to AI, either an action taken by AI or just general AI code rot coupled with developer knowledge decay?