Stepping into an elevator at Barron's Midtown Manhattan office yesterday evening, my phone buzzed in my pocket. An ominous text from Mom: "Call me."
My stomach dropped. My parents are in their 60s; an unexpected call could be something serious. I rang her immediately.
"Do you use Outlook?" she said, almost breathlessly.
My mom's Louisiana-based company, she then told me, had suffered a near-total work stoppage since early Thursday afternoon as Microsoft experienced an outage in more than 70 countries. She just wanted to see I had been affected by the tech drama, too.
"No, Mom, I don't use Microsoft Outlook," I said, my anxiety receding.
Luckily, Barron's made the transition from the Microsoft Office suite to Google Workspace years ago. I reassured her that I had dutifully received many, many emails throughout the day -- and was even able to reply to a few in between nonstop stories about Nvidia. I swear I heard a billowy sigh of relief on the other end of the phone.
While I escaped Thursday's tech debacle, my mom was far from alone. Hundreds of millions of others that use Microsoft 365 services to email, conduct video calls, and communicate with co-workers were similarly locked out of the software suite at the center of their daily toil, unable to conduct business as usual.
White-collar workers were most obviously affected. Some firms had to cancel their third-quarter earnings calls. Dentists apologized on Facebook, warning patients that their services could be disrupted. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, one of Ohio's biggest newspapers, told readers in a text that it lost its chief way of communicating with the public. When Outlook goes down, the paper wrote, "life gets challenging."
Others had more fun with it. A friend who works at an investment management firm in London said she was "picking her split ends" all day waiting for Microsoft Outlook and Teams to be restored. She also enjoyed some unscheduled TV time: "I've watched, like, five episodes of Vampire Diaries," she said.
The outage was starting to be resolved by midday Friday, more than 24 hours after it started. Microsoft still hasn't said what caused the outage, but said it ruled out malicious activity. (That actually isn't super comforting: If Microsoft is going to go down, I'd rather it be from something largely out of its control, rather than any internal incompetence or infrastructure failures.)
But the aftermath of the outage is far from over. I imagine many workers are spending their Friday afternoons playing email catch-up as Outlook is restored, instead of winding down for the weekend. More importantly, the cost of lost productivity from the outage amounts to at least $7 billion, according to the Anderson Economic Group.
For many Wall Street analysts, tech heads, and news junkies like me, though, Microsoft wasn't the big news of the day. For good reason: Former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's affair with an alleged Chinese spy, and the chipmaker's stock subsequent dive, is one of the most consequential and exciting tech stories in recent memory. The scandal compounded the negative AI sentiment that has pummeled tech stocks and unnerved investors in recent weeks.
But the Outlook outage served as a stark reminder that there are technologies the world can actually live without, and those we cannot. We can debate which category AI belongs to, but, after this week, it is clear that Microsoft fits into the latter. That might be why its stock only fell slightly Thursday and has already recovered fully -- the market knows we need access to Outlook and PowerPoint, however begrudgingly.
There are alternatives to Microsoft Office, of course, and maybe after this week some businesses will be compelled to explore them. Anthropic recently unveiled Claude Suite, which includes AI-powered tools called Claude Sheets, Claude Whiteboards, and Claude Meeting. Alphabet offers Google Workspace, with its 3 billion users.
I'm one of those happy 3 billion. But even I couldn't escape the long tentacles of Microsoft this week. I had to cancel a flight Thursday night, in part due to bad weather, but also because I couldn't stomach the prospect of standing in the abnormally long airport security lines that some on social media were reporting and attributing to the outage.
I caught another flight midday Friday. In the security line, the man next to me confirmed Outlook was back up and running. His phone wouldn't stop dinging.
I was reminded that in this new world of otherworldly, intangible technologies like AI and futuristic firms like Nvidia, there is still a special category of things that businesses truly need to do business -- like a functioning email inbox. I also remembered how much technology still connects us, too -- whether it's a virtual office meeting or communal gripes about said office meeting.
It even gave me a chance to catch up with my family unexpectedly. (But next time your email goes down, Mom, please just text.)
Write to emily.russell@barrons.com.
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