Companies and institutions should reduce their dependence on a single technology provider and develop backup solutions, Mikołaj Rogalewicz of CyberDefence24 told PAP, commenting on the Microsoft outage.
Thursday’s outage of Microsoft services cut millions of users around the world off from Outlook email, the Teams app and other basic office tools. The problems also affected banks, government institutions and courts in many countries.
According to Downdetector, a service that monitors internet outages, reports of problems came in from 74 countries and territories within about an hour.
Mikołaj Rogalewicz of CyberDefence24 and the University of Warsaw acknowledged in an interview with PAP that the scale of the outage is exceptionally large. “Based on the information emerging, the outage primarily concerns the availability of cloud services and the infrastructure that handles connections,” he said.
In his view, nothing at this stage suggests that the outage was caused by a cyberattack or sabotage. The problems involve the infrastructure responsible for connections to Microsoft services, and one of the symptoms is an overload of some servers. The exact causes of the outage, however, require further clarification.
The expert pointed out that, given the nature of the outage and the fact that it hit Microsoft services, many businesses around the world are feeling its effects. A huge number of companies use the corporation’s products, so disruptions to them can destabilize the operations of many organizations.
“This proves how dependent we are on this type of technology and, in fact, on just a few companies. And how much an outage at one company can cause problems for the entire system,” Rogalewicz said.
He recalled that outages of this kind have happened before, for example the 2024 CrowdStrike software failure, which hit air transport, among other sectors. The lesson from such outages, he added, should be greater diversification of the systems in use.
“This situation shows that companies and institutions should reduce their dependence on a single technology provider, and also develop backup solutions and procedures ensuring business continuity in the event of an outage. Some companies are already trying to do this, temporarily switching to other solutions so they can keep operating,” the expert noted. (PAP)
