Expert discusses widespread Microsoft Outlook outage

Microsoft dealing with a widespread outage today. The tech giant reporting issues with Exchange Online, mailboxes with Microsoft Teams. Hundreds of thousands of users reported email outages and other connectivity issues linked to Microsoft 365 services. Now, the tech company says it's investigating the problem, adding the server disruptions becoming unexpectedly unavailable. Those are their words. It's possibly because of, quote, elevated load. Joining us in studio tonight, Matt Friedman, the co-founder of Tanner Friedman PR, and it's always so good to see you. Thanks for joining us here tonight. I think it's of note to read this out loud. This is a multi-billion dollar company that runs all these servers, and had a large public relations message out there, and part of what they said is, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center under EX1550543. We determined the elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, straining the remaining infrastructure, working to safely return them to service. I don't quite understand what that means, do you? No, that is geek speak, to say the least. And it doesn't use any of the fundamentals of crisis communication that we try to teach to our clients, to businesses of all sizes. None of the fundamentals are hits. I can walk you through what they should be saying. If somebody who hasn't had email in more than 10 hours wants to know, number one, what are the facts? What happened here? Level with your audience. Tell them what happened. Number two, provide reassurance, we're craving leadership at a time like this. Tell me that it's going to be okay and that you're going to fix it and maybe manage my expectations about how long that's gonna take. And number three, concern for the people affected. They have communicated nothing to indicate that they understand what a disruption this is to our businesses, to our lives, how we depend on their technology. None of that, they're pointing us to some forum someplace. Where they talk to engineers. And the engineers obviously are not going to be able to do the PR that's needed to make us feel secure and good about the future. I find it interesting that you compare it to the response to, let's say, a recall with a car. These car companies have tremendous public relations machines and they put out words that matter and make sense. Even a power company says the tree fell and hit the line and we're trying to repair the line. And that's why your power's out. That makes sense to people, and they may not like it, but it makes sense. Bad things happen to good companies all the time, and Microsoft, by any definition, is a good company. Sure. Success is evident. The trillions of dollars in market cap, we all know that. Stock price above 500 bucks. All of the metrics are there. But in this case, they're not acting like a good company in this moment, because they're not following these fundamentals that, as you mentioned, businesses should follow. Should know this and a company like Microsoft should prepare for this. One of the things we do with our clients along with their legal counsel and their cyber security advisors is we'll put together tabletop exercises. What that means is that the company gets to practice the crisis. So when it happens, not if it happens, but when it happens, they can communicate. They can react in every respect the way that they'll need to. In this case, it makes me wonder. What happened to that tabletop exercise of the mass Outlook outage? They must have had one. Yeah, that's fascinating. And I'm sure this was not the outcome of that exercise. Well, in these tabletop exercises, for those who aren't familiar, any company will literally set up like phone lines within a building and have an entire day or two's worth of training saying, oops, the New York Times is calling and the reporter will, the pseudo The pseudo reporter will be on the phone challenging you to answer the questions that Inevitably are being asked right now at this hour. They haven't answered any questions from any news organizations. They haven't put out a video that you would think that Microsoft would have every communications platform at their disposal. They only used X today. And they used it to deliver that message that you read to your audience just a minute ago. Well, I do want to ask you to look at this, to bottom line it. The elevated load isn't driven by an increase in traffic, but by a number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable. The question that would then be asked as a reporter if we had access to them would be, why were these servers unavailable unexpectedly? Because that's a problem. Yeah, one of the things that we suggest to clients is, Answer the inevitable questions before they're asked. The big question going on right now on the Internet as we're talking here is, was this some sort of cyber attack? Was this terrorism? Was this some sort of hack or ransomware attack? We don't know, they're not saying, and the audiences will use their imagination to fill in blanks if a company does not answer those questions. Oh, and social media is good at filling in blanks, so the vacuum of information, people come up with their own theories, and that's a problem, and it's not good for them either in the long run. Bottom line right now, we still don't know, and we still don't know when everything's coming back online, right? Yeah, there's been no reassurance given to us, so when we wake up tomorrow morning and try to do business, will these tools be available to us? It's going to be another tough day tomorrow. Or you have to try to remember the emails and start a Gmail or a Yahoo or something and go back to work because you got to do the work of the people for your company. Yes. Matt Friedman, so good to see you. Thanks for joining us. And thanks for your perspective here tonight. Thank you.