Workplaces around the world were heavily impacted over the past two days after Microsoft experienced a widespread outage.
The problem affected everything from emails to Xbox.
WGAL News 8 On Your Side Consumer Investigator Brian Roche talked with a cybersecurity expert about the issue.
“What kind of happened in this scenario is, the highway slowed down and that traffic that it was directing to the services became overwhelmed, and the users couldn’t reliably access the systems,” said Nick Paulukow with One to One Cybersecurity.
Paulukow says the specifics of the Outlook outage have yet to be revealed.
“Microsoft reported themselves that they made a change in what they would refer to as the networking or the way that you get on the highway.”
Over a million businesses operate on Microsoft products to communicate from emails to work calendars. The outage brought the workday to a stop for many employees.
Some workers took to social media to express their frustration, while others welcomed the break in their busy workday.
Microsoft said no data was lost, but this outage could be a wake-up call for many.
“Although it’s a highly reliable system, we should still also be concerned about how do we back up our data? Or, how do we protect the data that we have? We own that responsibility,” said Paulukow.
When it comes to backing up your data, there is no one-size-fits-all fix. It all depends on your device and your software.
