There you have it! My emails went dark Thursday around 11 AM. This morning it is back, but messag…
November 13, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
Defense Cybersecurity
There you have it! My emails went dark Thursday around 11 AM. This morning it is back, but messages are still trickling in like nothing happened.
Full story, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/efUjhm7C
This was not a small hiccup. Microsoft 365 went down across the globe. Outlook on web, desktop and mobile. Exchange Online. Teams. SharePoint. Copilot. Even Defender XDR, according to SecurityWeek.
Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports at the peak, per the Guardian.
Government agencies, courts and schools went dark on email. The NHS reported serious disruption, and pharmacies couldn't reach doctors about prescriptions. UK police told people to phone in crimes. Airlines lost email support. Portfolio managers couldn't authenticate into trading platforms.
So what happened?
Microsoft says servers started failing automated health checks and dropped out of service. The traffic piled onto the servers still standing, and the process that sets up secure connections got overwhelmed. Microsoft rolled back a recent network configuration change that coincided with the start of the outage.
Then the fixes didn't hold. Servers came back online and went unresponsive again the moment traffic hit them. Microsoft said itself the changes were "not taking as expected."
Was it a hack? Microsoft says it has "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." No attacker needed. One bad change and the world's inbox stopped.
As of early Friday, Microsoft was only reporting "early stabilization." It extended email timeouts to 48 hours so delayed mail isn't lost. Not fully fixed. Close to a full day of pain.
Here is my problem.
We have put every egg in one basket. Email, chat, files, AI, security. One vendor. One control plane. When it breaks, your whole company breaks with it, and you sit there refreshing a status page.
That is not resilience. That is hope.
I've spent my career telling the Pentagon to kill single points of failure. Your business is no different.
Have a backup email path that doesn't run through the same provider. Know how your team talks when Teams is down. Keep critical contacts offline. Actually test your continuity plan before the day you need it. And trust but verify your vendor, because their status page is not your recovery plan.
Microsoft will publish its post-incident report. Good. Read it.
Then go build a plan B.
Time to wake up!
Full story, just the facts: https://lnkd.in/efUjhm7C
This was not a small hiccup. Microsoft 365 went down across the globe. Outlook on web, desktop and mobile. Exchange Online. Teams. SharePoint. Copilot. Even Defender XDR, according to SecurityWeek.
Downdetector logged nearly 130,000 reports at the peak, per the Guardian.
Government agencies, courts and schools went dark on email. The NHS reported serious disruption, and pharmacies couldn't reach doctors about prescriptions. UK police told people to phone in crimes. Airlines lost email support. Portfolio managers couldn't authenticate into trading platforms.
So what happened?
Microsoft says servers started failing automated health checks and dropped out of service. The traffic piled onto the servers still standing, and the process that sets up secure connections got overwhelmed. Microsoft rolled back a recent network configuration change that coincided with the start of the outage.
Then the fixes didn't hold. Servers came back online and went unresponsive again the moment traffic hit them. Microsoft said itself the changes were "not taking as expected."
Was it a hack? Microsoft says it has "no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident." No attacker needed. One bad change and the world's inbox stopped.
As of early Friday, Microsoft was only reporting "early stabilization." It extended email timeouts to 48 hours so delayed mail isn't lost. Not fully fixed. Close to a full day of pain.
Here is my problem.
We have put every egg in one basket. Email, chat, files, AI, security. One vendor. One control plane. When it breaks, your whole company breaks with it, and you sit there refreshing a status page.
That is not resilience. That is hope.
I've spent my career telling the Pentagon to kill single points of failure. Your business is no different.
Have a backup email path that doesn't run through the same provider. Know how your team talks when Teams is down. Keep critical contacts offline. Actually test your continuity plan before the day you need it. And trust but verify your vendor, because their status page is not your recovery plan.
Microsoft will publish its post-incident report. Good. Read it.
Then go build a plan B.
Time to wake up!