Well, that was fun
Did you get caught up in the Microsoft meltdown? It began yesterday, midday Eastern time. It happened when more than one server failed an automated health check and was taken offline. The remaining servers couldn’t take the load and shat the bed.
That’s a technical term.
And it was a big one: Downdetector reports from 74 countries and territories. Reports just on Outlook near 140,000. There are more than 450 million paid Microsoft 365 commercial subscriptions. Copilot, OpenAI and Anthropic were all hit.
Here’s the thing, though. Microsoft is adamant there weren’t any bad actors involved. It was simply a failure of their monitoring service, which had permission to shut everything down. When they say AI is going to kill us all, this is the kind of thing they’re talking about: fallible automated systems given too much control.
Me? I was in town having lunch with friends and only knew about it through headlines. I recommend it. Have a good weekend!
November 13, 2026 — 5:48 pm
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