Jack Tame: What yesterday's Outlook outage reminded me

I figure there are two kinds of people in this world.  

There are those who consider and respond to every single email they receive. Not necessarily by replying to it or forwarding it on, but by responding. They might file it. They might archive it. They might delete it. But that point is they will do something, they won’t be content with it just languishing in their inbox.  

I’d argue that these people are also the kinds of people who, the moment they get some spam in their inbox or a message from a mailing list they don’t want, they’ll studiously unsubscribe to ensure they don’t get any more.  

And then there’s the other type. The ‘6452 unread emails’ type. The who-cares-if-I’m-on-the-mailing-list, please-flood-me-with-your-homewares-promotions-I’m-never-gonna-bother-unsubscribing type, apparently not at all stressed or affected in any way.  

Three. That’s how many emails I had in my inbox when Microsoft confirmed that technical issues were causing problems with its services around the globe.    

Just three.   

The reason I know this is that although I wasn’t in a position to receive or send emails, I was for whatever reason still able to log in and see what messages were sitting in my inbox. Three.   

It should go without saying, therefore, that I’m someone who is usually pretty attentive to his work email, who will even admit to not being able to properly relax in the knowledge that his emails were disorganised and messages needed to be sent.   

Yesterday’s fiasco was yet another reminder of our shared dependence on technology. When half the world is reliant on the same system in order to function, and that system goes down, you are reminded that for all our brilliance as a species, the flipside to convenience and digital interconnectedness is vulnerability.     

It’s not hard to imagine a much more damaging crisis than a Microsoft Outlook fault. For starters, from what we understand, this was just a fault. It wasn’t deliberate.   

In the last six months or so, as AI tools have become increasingly adept at finding and exploiting security vulnerabilities, for the first time in decades, I’ve started keeping a bit of cash on hand.  

Not much, mind. Don’t get excited. Just enough for a few groceries or some petrol in an emergency. I never used to think twice about it. Now, I’m not so confident. I’m not advocating for a world where we only use cash, but as someone who uses his cell phone for 99% of transactions, I think there are all sorts of plausible scenarios where cash is very, very useful indeed.  

As for my emails? Well. They’re back up and running this morning. But although the outage might have cost tens or hundreds of millions in lost productivity around the world, I’ll admit that on this occasion, I did not actually suffer email anxiety.  

A day without emails? Honestly... it was kind of nice.