Delays in Microsoft’s Outlook email system and problems accessing Microsoft 365 online services were reported. There were uncomfortable, albeit brief, echoes of last July’s Microsoft outage caused by a faulty security software update that caused widespread chaos for days afterwards. But the damage that the incident has inflicted on people’s confidence in cloud services will be harder to repair. It does not help that the latest cloud service outage is the second in as many weeks. Cloud computing is largely dominated by three big companies: Microsoft, Amazon and Google, with other major players that include IBM, Oracle and Alibaba.

Source: The Irish Times October 30, 2025 17:02 UTC