Global food and drink businesses are operating at peak stress levels in the midst of a worldwide Microsoft outage that began on Thursday November 12, running through to Friday 13.
A surge in reports of issues with Microsoft services on monitoring website Downdetector began on Thursday at 18:00, when almost 140,000 people flagged problems with Outlook.
“I’m assuming it’s the equivalent of a snow day for adults,” a senior source inside one of the UK’s biggest fresh food suppliers said.
“But, Microsoft Office and Teams are vital for internal communications, so it will be very problematic,” he continued.
“In terms of logistics and fulfilling orders, I imagine a lot of food and drink companies don’t use email, but proprietary systems,” continued the source. “The problem won’t be fulfilling orders, but communicating on anything around them.”
Some food and drink retailers have already warned customers that parts of their operations are affected by the Microsoft outage.
Supermarkets react to outage
UK supermarket Asda wrote on its website that some online shopping processes, such as new customer registrations and password resets, are down. Though Asda’s stores across the UK were operating as normal and there were currently no issues with supplies.
Logistics companies were already set up to operate effectively in trying conditions, Logistics UK CEO Ben Fletcher said.
“Logistics is one of the most flexible and adaptable industries and very experienced in reacting to disruption caused by factors outside of its control – whether that is extreme weather, congestion or in this case an IT outage.”
Many food and drink businesses trained regularly on how to deal with such unexpected events, and had multiple systems in place, including manual processes, to ensure the continued delivery of essential goods and services, he said.
However, disruption was to be expected, particularly as companies swap out digital and email systems for backup processes.
Communications experts have advised all businesses to adapt in the face of the outage and ensure customers can still communicate with retailers and brands and buy what they need when they need it.
Microsoft outage continues
“From expecting a temporary glitch to the Microsoft issue being an ongoing outage – communication is going to be key for all business today and potentially into next week,” said a spokesman at food and drink PR and marketing agency, Nexus.
“Create dedicated phone lines for customer comms, social media updates, web page updates and use slack and WhatsApp for internal comms. The saving grace is that most business are sharing this pain.”
Microsoft has since confirmed an “elevated load” on its infrastructure, meaning servers had higher than usual demands and some had become “unexpectedly unavailable”, leading to others overloading.
The tech giant, which serves more than 430 million people with its Microsoft 365 apps in 74 countries, has since reported some positive results from its fixes.
There are “early signs of stabilisation,” according to an update from Microsoft, which added system health was “variable” as it slowly introduces traffic back to its systems through its fix.
“As part of this effort, we are extending the email timeout window to 48 hours to help protect delayed messages while service recovery continues,” a statement read.
This story is being updated, please contact Nicholas Robinson with additional information: +44 01293 610 436.