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A worldwide outage of Microsoft’s Outlook left millions without e-mail this week.Dado Ruvic/Reuters
The disruption that knocked out Microsoft services this week extracted a major toll on workplace productivity and raised questions about Canada’s reliance on U.S.-based tech companies.
But some also saw it as a mixed blessing.
The drumbeat of e-mails that interrupt the lives of office workers everywhere went silent for several hours, creating an opening for extended focus and freeing them from the next task, report or meeting.
“It’s the new snow day,” said Fenwick McKelvey, professor of communication studies at Concordia University.
He described expecting to have an afternoon of answering e-mails on Thursday, only to experience a peculiar kind of delight when the work became impossible, because Microsoft e-mail wasn’t functioning.
“I wasn’t sitting with this constant expectation that an e-mail was going to be coming my way that I needed to respond to,” Prof. McKelvey said.
On Friday, Microsoft apologized, saying it was “deeply sorry” for the disruption the incident had caused. The outage began Thursday around midday in Canada, taking offline a suite of services that millions around the world rely on to communicate, share documents and hold meetings. By Friday morning, many services were being restored.
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Microsoft said in a statement that the outage was caused by a technical issue and was not related to “cyber or AI/agents.”
“The incident was introduced by an issue during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced following a recent network change,” the company said in a statement. “Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration.”
Prof. McKelvey said the extent of the outage provoked a feeling of helplessness. He said it was reminiscent of the July 2022 outage that knocked out services for Rogers wireless customers.
It also raised questions about digital sovereignty, considering how many Canadian institutions rely on U.S. tech companies for crucial services such as communication and data storage.
“To see someone like Microsoft experience an outage that lasts multiple hours is a wake-up call,” Prof. McKelvey said. “You’re left with a lot of questions and not a lot of ways finding answers, so I do think it’s unsettling.”
The list of Canadian institutions that were affected is lengthy and includes schools, hospitals, police and governments.
The University Health Network in Toronto said its e-mail was down Thursday but services were being restored as of Friday morning and that patient care was not affected. The University of British Columbia said its e-mail service was also being restored by Friday morning. The City of Brampton said some online forms and city services were affected.
The Government of Canada had nearly $250-million in contracts with Microsoft for IT software licensing in 2021-2022, according to a contract analysis published by Carleton University’s School of Public Policy and Administration.
The RCMP said some employees had issues using some Microsoft 365 applications, such as Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive and Copilot, and employees were provided with guidance on mitigating the impact.
“At this time, there were no impacts to RCMP operational policing services or public-facing emergency response capabilities,” said Lisa McDonald-Bourg of national headquarters public affairs.
Emmanuelle Vaast, a professor of information systems at McGill University, said she took advantage of the e-mail silence to do some focused work that otherwise would have been subject to a stream of interruptions.
“At an individual level, it was a little bit of a blessing, although, of course, I realize that at the organizational level, and the collective level, the cost is very high,” Prof. Vaast said.
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But the longer the outage went on, she also experienced a mounting sense of anxiety about what would await her when e-mail was eventually restored.
When the system was up and running again Friday morning, there were 78 messages waiting for her, many of them from students who needed a prompt reply.
She said the incident is interesting because it doesn’t appear to have been the work of a malicious actor, which shows that it’s not just cyber attacks that can have serious consequences for IT systems. But it also reveals how dependent our society is on a relative handful of companies.
A discussion about whether that should change is more advanced in Europe, she said. But the ease, availability and low cost that the big players can offer represent a trade-off that many organizations have shown they’re willing to accept.
“The big picture is I don’t foresee this being a huge turn in the history of dependence upon Microsoft,” Prof. Vaast said.