Microsoft nearing "normal levels" after global outage

The Microsoft outage disrupted businesses and millions of users around the world. It knocked out Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook email, Microsoft Teams, and much more. FOX 13's Craig Patrick in now to break it all down on the cause and the fallout. Okay, so first of all, Craig, what went wrong? Automated safety checks. That's the short answer. Look, Microsoft has a lot of servers, and they want to make sure those servers are healthy. So they have these automated checks that go through. Is this server corrupted? Is there a problem? Does it need to come down or not? This happens all the time. But in this case, it flagged a server that was unhealthy, needed to come offline. Okay, they took it offline. This server's messed up too, the automated check shows. Okay, well, a little unexpected. We'll take that one off too. So is this one messed up. So what was happening is that the... automated safety check system was malfunctioning. The servers weren't bad. They weren't unhealthy or corrupted. Rather, the check system was failing. And what happened is the remaining servers got overloaded because all the traffic, the millions of users. And as you see here, they noted that they're continuing to work on recovering all the servers with all the lost capacity, but they lost so much capacity. What capacity they had simply got Chris overrun. Okay, but do they know what caused the automated safety check system to fail? Not exactly. We do know it was caused by an upgrade. That was the trigger. It was an upgrade intended to increase capacity on the system. Of course, it did just the opposite, but that's not your question. Okay, what caused it? It was an upgrade, but what went wrong with the upgrade? Microsoft hasn't explained yet, and I would suspect Microsoft doesn't even yet know what caused the problem with the upgrade or the update. They've just confined that to being the circumstance. The investigation will determine exactly, technically, what went wrong with it. Okay, so we saw all of the disruption. How widespread was it, and what's the fallout for Microsoft? Well, as we know so far, 74 different countries, that includes Law enforcement that was affected overseas in Australia and this country includes business being disrupted in the U.S. House of Representatives. We're talking about communication systems for the national health system in the U.K. So doctors were having trouble communicating with pharmacies to get their patients the prescriptions that they needed for some length of time. Those are just examples, and it speaks to the fact that people may have initially noticed that it was their email that went out, but there is so much more, too. Thank you for joining us. All the lost time that so many people sustained in dealing with this. Yeah, of course, some people still losing time. Why did it take so long to fix? Because you can't just turn the servers on and off. It's a long running process. And they were caught off guard, frankly. And what happened was when they took all these servers offline, the remaining servers got overwhelmed. They started bringing new servers online. Well, then what happened? Traffic immediately got it. redirected to that to the point that the server got overwhelmed with more traffic than it is generally accustomed to handling so it shuts down again so the attempt to repair bogs down so what they had to do is back up and then more gradually carefully bring these servers back online which is to say they didn't exactly have a detailed system of how to recover from a problem like this having never recovered from one like it before maybe they will develop such a detailed system now so What can we as a technology-dependent society learn from this? Well, the convenience creates dependence, doesn't it? So if you are dependent or someone you know, and that applies to all of us on a cloud computing system, then it behooves us ultimately to have a backup system, other ways that we can communicate. All right, very good. Craig Patrick, thank you for the insight as always. Thank you.