The Grass Isn’t Any Greener, Microsoft Outages Felt Worldwide

A decade or so ago, every IT guy was on local systems.  Then came the cloud which was an old approach to computing dating back to at least the 80’s (shhh no one wants you to know that) and it was hyped as the best thing since sliced bread.  It was going to revolutionize IT, drive down costs, improve…

So, of course, business decision makers jumped on the hype word of the week and corporation after corporation made the expensive switch over to ‘The Cloud’.

Well, here we are today, with many companies entirely Cloud based, solely dependent on The  Cloud for everything they do and what happens!

Microsoft IT Outage Disrupts Flights, Banks, Media Outlets
A widespread Microsoft outage was disrupting flights, banks, media outlets and companies around the world on Friday.
Microsoft outage live updates: Worldwide travel and banking hit after cybersecurity update causes IT chaos
More than 1,000 flights are cancelled and payment and healthcare services affected after Crowdstrike software update triggers Microsoft outages.
Une panne géante de Microsoft paralyse de nombreuses entreprises dans le monde
Compagnies aériennes clouées au sol, files d'attente dans les aéroports, problème de télécommunication de la TV australienne ABC, Bourse de Londres perturbée: depuis quelques heures, le nombre d'entreprises faisant état de panne ou de perturbations se multiplie.

Dans un message intitulé « Dégradation du service », Microsoft indique que les utilisateurs « peuvent être dans l'incapacité d'accéder à diverses applications et services Microsoft 365 ».

and there are dozen more such articles as companies worldwide are crippled.

The TV station I watch was explaining they can’t even print.  Then again, they were lucky that they could even log in to their PC as many users couldn’t even do that.

My biggest client is down, as is access to their Financial systems!

Now, this post isn’t about bashing The Cloud or even Microsoft.  It is simply a reminder that placing all your eggs in one basket is a recipe for disaster and that local server, local IT infrastructure should remain an important part of your IT strategy.

It’s fine to include aspects of The Cloud in a strategy, but as many companies are finding out one shouldn’t solely depend on them for everything.

Just as much as local systems can go down, we are finding out that even the IT giants also will have failures, interruptions in services!  Nothing is infallible!

As far as The Cloud reducing costs, in my experience, that is pure fiction! If anything costs have gone up. Support has gone down as now you have to contact Microsoft…

As I said, things aren’t any greener, just different. 6 of one, half a dozen of the other.

Update

Well, it seems this isn’t a Microsoft issue, but rather a CrowdStrike (3rd party security provider) update issue!  Amazing how an application could brick computers in the manner in which it has.

Also amazing how so many critical IT infrastructure systems were all dependent on the same software!  And I thought IT admins were supposed to test updates before production deployment.  So many layers to this issue.

This once again proves how dependent companies are on Microsoft Windows, as only it was affected. Diversifying, having dual boot with Linux might have spared a lot of frustrations for some companies! With the direction Microsoft has taken with Windows 11 and this most recent event, Linux is more and more the smarter option!