Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical.

So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much.

However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future

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rifkiamil a day ago | parent | next [-]

It must be 15–20 years now that Mimecast has been offering a protective layer around email services like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. Even today, you can see companies that are still able to keep their email running during Microsoft outages because they have Mimecast's email continuity service in place. It shows the value of having that extra layer of resilience.

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rzerowan a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc. However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.

A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.

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NetMageSCW a day ago | parent [-]

Even 72 hours isn’t enough - how will they conduct business with anyone else if they are still down and how will they get their old emails to resume conversations and how will they transfer their known email addresses or inform others of their new email addresses? None of that is cheap or easy.

	▲	nagaiaida 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		what big businesses use provider-domain email addresses that would necessitate new email addresses just for switching mailserver hosting?

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freehorse a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Regular businesses sure, but governments, public and essential services should have different criteria imo and should rethink their reliance on these services.

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newsclues a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.

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wickedsight a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical

Switching to what though? It's not like we didn't have outages before SaaS. It just happened at different times throughout the year in stead of all having an outage at the same time.

I feel like the big difference right now is that management can't call the EoD for progress updates every 10 minutes, they just have to assume that someone at Microsoft is working on fixing the issue.

	▲	ifwinterco a day ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed, realistically in 2026 switching from Microsoft to Gsuite, those are the only two things I've ever seen companies use, and Google doesn't have 100% uptime either. So yes that's another argument to not do anything and stick with Microsoft unless things become terrible