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The Microsoft outage<\/a> has the potential to be \u201cone of the most economically damaging in history\u201d, according to some estimates.<\/p>\n After nearly a day of disruption<\/a>, Microsoft<\/a> services are coming back online, but the damage may continue to be felt for a long time.<\/p>\n Microsoft users experienced issues with Outlook<\/a>, Teams, Copilot and other services, which affected government agencies, schools, hospitals and major businesses<\/a> across 74 countries.<\/p>\n The scale means the disruption could be hugely economically damaging for those affected, while knock-on costs impact organisations that do not even use Microsoft services.<\/p>\n Early forecasts suggest the incident had an impact on billions of pounds\u2019 worth of economic activity due to the interruption to communications, transactions and productivity.<\/p>\n Samuel Mather-Holgate, managing director at the UK-based financial advisory firm Mather & Murray Financial, described it as a \u201cterrifying demonstration\u201d of how fragile our modern economy has become.<\/p>\n \u201cThis could become one of the most economically damaging technology outages in history,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Microsoft goes down, the world doesn\u2019t just lose its emails \u2013 huge parts of the global economy effectively grind to a halt. The financial losses could be astronomical, and most businesses will recover little more than service credits from Microsoft.<\/p>\n \u201cThe really frightening part is how dangerously dependent we\u2019ve become on a handful of technology giants. We\u2019ve effectively handed them the keys to the global economy, with precious little backup.\u201d<\/p>\n It comes just 10 months after a similar outage at the company, which affected multiple Microsoft 365 services.<\/p>\n Microsoft described it as a service functionality issue affecting a subset of customers intermittently, though no official figures were given regarding the number of people or organisations affected.<\/p>\n Reports to the online status tracker Downdetector suggest it was relatively minor compared to the latest disruption.<\/p>\n There is no way to accurately measure the total economic cost of these outages for all of those impacted, but for many it results in a massive loss in productivity.<\/p>\n For some companies that use Microsoft services for both email and video calls, it can even result in a complete paralysis of workplace communications.<\/p>\n Experts have called for contingency plans in the event of future outages, such as backing up staff and customer phone numbers to a service that is not linked to the same email provider.<\/p>\n This would allow them to continue communicating via phone or through services not connected to their core provider, such as WhatsApp<\/a> or Telegram<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIn the wake of this outage, organisations must have a plan in place for how to work without such tools, for when incidents like this occur,\u201d Matt Saunders, field chief technology officer at the tech consultancy firm Adaptavist, told The Independent<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople can use the old-fashioned phone for meetings, but that\u2019s challenging when everyone\u2019s numbers are in a system that is also offline.<\/p>\n \u201cAn outage like this almost throws us back to the dark ages, so it\u2019s hard to plan for these systems not being there. But each time you\u2019re interacting with an online system, think a little bit about how you\u2019d get that task done without it, so the world doesn\u2019t stop turning when something goes down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n![\"Microsoft](\"https:\/\/static.the-independent.com\/2026\/11\/13\/10\/3092244ae7e345b723ecc546195154d3Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaGFwaSwxNzk0NjUxOTU1-2.86475084.jpg\")
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