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During an outage, attackers don't scan servers, they phish people
During the 12-13 November Microsoft 365 outage my small edge saw no Microsoft-themed attacks. CrowdStrike 2024 and this week's scam warnings show where outage attackers go: inboxes and phones. Includes a staff checklist.
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20 hours without email: what the Microsoft 365 outage showed
Microsoft 365 was down for more than 20 hours in 70+ countries, cutting email at Australia's spy agency, courts, a stock exchange and UK GPs. Microsoft blames a network change and a retry storm; the post-incident review is not out yet.
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Do layoffs cause outages? What the evidence actually shows
Microsoft 365 failed for 20+ hours weeks after Microsoft offered buyouts to 60,000 staff. I graded every case where staff cuts or AI changes were blamed for outages. If the effect is real, it shows first in recovery time.
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One outage, 55 languages: how the world told the Microsoft story
LSN News measured 4,556 articles from 2,272 outlets in 55 languages on the Microsoft 365 outage. Britain saw failing public services, the US asked "Is Outlook down?", Spain and France saw a global collapse.
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What to expect in 2027: forecasts for work and outages, with the odds
My numbers for the next 12 to 18 months: another global outage at 90-95%, wider European car-industry cuts at about 85%, compulsory cuts at Microsoft at about 65%. How to read the odds, and how I will score them in public.
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How a wrong cause travels: "unusually high demand"
About 80 articles carried Microsoft's real explanation of the outage and about 6 said "unusually high demand". My own AI brief repeated the wrong one. Why it happened, what is fixed, and how to read causes in the news.
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Outages are getting rarer and bigger: ten years of global failures
Data-centre outage rates have fallen five years running, yet major cloud incidents rose from 7 in 2024 to 18 in 2026. A decade of global failures, the causes that repeat, and my forecast: a 90–95% chance of another global outage within a year.
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Normal accidents in the cloud: what Perrow, Cook and Dekker predicted
Perrow, Cook, Dekker and Geer predicted how cloud outages unfold: small failures interacting in tightly coupled systems, no single root cause, slow drift, and monoculture. Their words mapped onto CrowdStrike, AWS October 2025 and Microsoft November 2026.
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The cloud now has a supervisor: DORA, UK CTPs and concentration risk
The EU named 19 critical tech providers under DORA in November 2025, and the UK designated Microsoft, Google, AWS and Oracle from 13 July 2026. Both regimes aim at recovery, not prevention. What that means for companies and engineers.