Big tech is here to let us down

The piece argues that Microsoft’s outage, which took Outlook, Teams and Copilot offline across two days, shows how vulnerable organizations become when they rely on a single technology provider. Some office workers welcomed the disruption as an unexpected day off, but small and medium-sized businesses lost normal support channels, while schools, universities and courts were also affected; healthcare may have been disrupted too. The author blames Microsoft’s engineering layoffs for making failures more likely and repairs slower, and questions whether the company will reimburse businesses for lost income or added costs. They also criticize its spending on unprofitable AI projects.

The broader concern is that public institutions and businesses across the Global North have become dependent on Microsoft services they cannot repair themselves: when systems fail, they must wait for the company to fix them. The author speculates sarcastically that AI-assisted coding may have contributed to the outage, while acknowledging it could have been an ordinary accident. They contrast the inconvenience - or relief - for some office workers with the potentially serious effects on essential services. European public institutions’ shift toward open-source software is presented as a way to reduce both reliance on a US company and exposure to future outages. A promised discussion of Nvidia and its global effects is left for another time.