Microsoft 'approaching normal levels' after outage

Well, if you work in corporate or any job that relies on email, you probably know that yesterday was a bit of a tough one. And Microsoft was down across all platforms, causing a bit of an issue, not just for local companies, but the American economy in general. Now, it does appear to be fixed. I know we've been sending emails all morning and they look like they've been going through. But this just kind of indicates an even bigger problem across these platforms. If we're only using one platform, what happens when it goes down? Well, it's a good thing we're joined by an expert here, Matt Rose, CEO of TechRage IT. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us about this. This is a huge story happening with Microsoft. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's definitely a big one. Definitely. And I kind of just wanted to ask you, you know, we've been seeing a lot of these outages lately. It feels like we just had an Outlook outage not that long ago. What is this indicative of that's happening inside of Microsoft? What's your take on this? It's hard to say. I mean, Microsoft hasn't come out and said exactly what was happening. I mean, this was definitely one of the longer ones I can remember in memory. There's, I would unfortunately say it's been common to have, you know, four or five hour outages, but this one being that it, I mean, realistically they, Microsoft has still said that it's considered a service degradation, so they haven't said it's done yet. So we're still, you know, there's still emails that are actually still catching up from yesterday. I understand that. I understand that. But I think it's just really realizing Thank you. Thank you, Kira. Thank you, Kira. that these services are so complex. It's been a pleasure. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, everyone, for being here today. Microsoft is still a huge company that makes mistakes and we don't know yet if this was an update that went bad. They have said though that it is not a cybersecurity incident. That's all they've come out and said at this point. Well, that's good at least to know it's not a cybersecurity incident considering emails do contain some pretty sensitive sensitive information for businesses across the country. Say that something like that were to happen, do you think Microsoft would be able to handle a cybersecurity attack of that scale, should that happen in the future? I mean, I would hope they would. I mean, they obviously have a large team, even though they have added some layoffs of late, you know, they've been doubling down on AI like most companies have. I would hope that they've left security in place. And I think that they're required to. I mean, even if your business doesn't have various compliances, they do have many businesses who are, you know, bound by various compliance that they have to then prove. So I would think that they can handle it, but it's a matter of. There is a lot of things that Microsoft puts on the user. You know, they actually don't guarantee any backup of your data. So that's one thing that most people don't realize is that if Microsoft were to say, hey, we lost the last 30 days of data, they're not actually responsible to give it back to you. Interesting, I actually did not know that. Now, you mentioned AI, and that was another topic that I wanted to kind of bring into this. We all know AI is pretty inevitable when it comes to how it's being integrated into our technological software. But something that's also been going on is AI hacking and AI issues that have been causing outages across other companies. Do you think that that, since they haven't come out and said anything, we're not exactly sure, but could AI be a potential factor in this outage, or is that just speculation? I mean, it's definitely speculation, but I don't think it's a crazy thought because, again, most companies, including Microsoft, have been very big on using AI to, in their case, they've been actually getting rid of a lot of the workforce. And I remember reading something a few years ago that they suspected at some point they'd have AI writing 30% of their code. So is it possible that AI is? In the loop in some way, whether AI did an automatic update, whether AI wrote some code, it's entirely possible. We have to wait to see the final, what their cause analysis is, but I wouldn't be shocked if AI was involved in this in what looks to be a negative fashion. Yeah. And when we kind of talk about the global reliance on Microsoft, this outage caused It basically hurt the American economy and business sector for an entire day. What do you think that means for our global reliance on this one singular monopoly, this one singular company here that seems to have a monopoly on our technological software? What do you make of that? I mean, it's true, and I mean, I think if you look at it, I mean, there's no real definite figures, but I've seen the figures saying that, you know, Microsoft's 365 email is anywhere between, some people say as low as 30% of email. I've seen as high as 60% of worldwide email. I would guess it's closer to the 60%. You know, then you still have another 30% or so that would be on Google, and then, you know, the other is the other bit. And unfortunately, go through this, you know, I've talked to you guys after, like, you know, Various outages Cloudflare AWS things like that in the last year or so and it's we are very reliant upon very few companies but I don't know if there's an easy way to change that unless a competitor really. build something new. And in Microsoft, even Google's case now, they have had a service that has been known for 20 years in the case of Google+, and even longer with Microsoft. And so it's very hard to get off that even when you have an issue like this. And the alternative of having your own internal server is just very difficult. And even for small businesses, it's hard to manage. Then downtime of that is... Difficult as well considering these large companies have data centers that are geographically redundant power done and you know just a lot of money involved in that. Yeah, and we kind of talked a little bit about Google and how that can potentially be a competitor. My final question for you, Matt, here before we kind of wrap up is, do you think this is a sign that companies should attempt to diversify what platforms they're using? I know Microsoft's pretty, it's well known, it's been around, like you said, for years. But is this an indicator that we should start making a shift towards Google or something else? Or I know it's difficult to use our own servers for small businesses, but what do we do here? I think first we do need to take a little bit of a pause and see what comes out to be the reasoning, because there could be an interesting place. If this was caused by, let's say, AI kind of running amok, if you will, then maybe it actually helps the whole country kind of take a step back as to what we're allowing AI to do, which I've had many conversations with Garrett on here about. So there may be a silver lining if that's what it is. But otherwise, I think it's really difficult to say say that because you can diversify, but you're going to end up putting a lot of Money into that, you know, you're going to say, well, I'm going to try to have email here, but I'm going to do some sort of a backup over here. You're spending a lot of money. And yes, this was a very bad outage, but it's it's you may plan for for this and spend tens of thousands of even more depending on your business size to to kind of be, if you will, redundant. And it may not necessarily help so I think it's it's really a cost analysis you have to do as a business and as a person and I think in a lot of cases. It would cost a lot and I don't know how much it would really help you. Because even if you think about it, even if you did all these things to be redundant, and I had this conversation a lot last night. All right. All the other businesses that are using Microsoft aren't necessarily going to do what you just did. So even if you were working, even if you're a Google user yesterday, that's great. You had your email, you were able to be up and running. How many people are you emailing that weren't able to respond? So you weren't really efficient. So like it's, and even if you had an on-premise server, that's great. You had full access to it, but you were talking to almost nobody. So it's a difficult thing and you have to, that's the other thing I think you have to realize, all the risks you can try to get rid of if this happens. Who are you expecting to talk to after putting all this money into it? Exactly. Well, hopefully there'll be no more global outages at this scale. I mean, I know, like I said, here it was a little difficult to deal with, but I know that a lot of other companies had similar issues. But Matt Rose, CEO of TechRage IT, thanks for hopping on to talk about this pretty hot topic issue. And again, hopefully no more outages that we have to call you on to talk about. Always happy to help whenever you need me, but yeah, this one's a rough one. Hope everyone gets their emails and gets on with their day.