The global Microsoft failure reached Bangladesh. Outlook email, Microsoft Teams video conferencing and Word 365 online all stopped working for users here.
It began at 11:32pm on Thursday, Bangladesh time, and ran for more than 14 hours. Corporate Outlook users reported being unable to get in from first thing in the morning.
What it looked like from an office here
Mostafizur Rahman, an official at a research organisation that asked not to be named, told Prothom Alo he had been unable to use Outlook since the previous night, and that all of his organisation's online work had stopped.
"I haven't been able to use Microsoft Outlook since last night," he said.
That phrase — all online work stopped — is the accurate description, and it is worth being blunt about why. An organisation on Microsoft 365 does not merely lose email. It loses the calendar that says where people should be, the files stored in OneDrive, the meetings scheduled in Teams, and the shared documents half-written in Word 365. There is no partial version of that day.
The scale it reached
Downdetector showed the disruption reaching 74 countries within about an hour of it starting. Globally the products affected are used by tens of millions of people.
No Bangladesh-specific user count has been published, and that absence is itself telling: Microsoft 365 adoption here is concentrated in corporates, NGOs, banks and international organisations rather than among individual consumers, so the outage was invisible to most people and total for the organisations caught by it.
What Microsoft said, and when
The company first said its fix was showing positive results. Hours later it said the problem had not been permanently resolved. It stated that a cyber-attack did not cause the outage, said engineers were working on it, asked users for patience, and gave no timeline for full recovery.
Notice the sequence. "Positive results" came before the problem was understood, and had to be walked back. For anyone deciding whether to wait or switch to a workaround, that first update was worse than no update.
What an organisation here should take from it
The useful question is not whether Microsoft 365 is reliable — over a year it is more reliable than almost any self-hosted alternative. The question is what your organisation does on the day it is not.
Three things cost nothing and would have helped on Friday. Keep a second channel that does not run through Microsoft, so staff can be told what is happening — a WhatsApp group costs nothing and nobody needs training on it. Keep offline copies of the documents a day genuinely cannot proceed without, such as a signing deadline or a tender submission. And know, in advance, which of your deadlines are externally imposed, because those are the only ones an outage actually threatens.
The rest of the day's work waits. The tender that closed at 3pm does not.
One habit worth forming before the next one
Outages of this kind are not rare enough to treat as freak events, and they are never announced. The cheapest preparation is to know, today, where your organisation's last full export of contacts and calendar lives, and whether anyone can reach the files needed for tomorrow without going through Microsoft. If the answer to either is "nobody has checked", that is the whole task, and it takes an afternoon. The organisations that coped best on Friday were not the ones with better technology; they were the ones where somebody had already asked.
