Newsroom
A financial firm in Taiwan confirmed trades by fax. British insurer Aviva passed audio recordings over Bluetooth. And European stock exchange operator Euronext asked listed companies to pick up the phone. When Microsoft’s Outlook went down, some of the world’s biggest businesses got through Friday using tools they already had.
The outage began Thursday and stretched into a second day, disrupting Outlook email, Teams meetings and Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant. Microsoft attributed the disruption to server problems and said it had found no signs of malicious activity. By Friday, it reported progress in restoring services, though some users could still face delays getting their email.
In Cyprus, the Open University of Cyprus warned students and staff that they could have trouble connecting to Outlook and Teams or accessing files on OneDrive and SharePoint. For anyone trying to join an online class or open a shared document, the notice showed how one outage could interrupt several parts of the same working day.
There was a shipping angle, too. Maersk warned customers that routine emails and updates could be delayed and directed urgent queries to local offices by phone. A Cyprus importer waiting for a shipment update could still make a call while the usual notifications were held up. Euronext, meanwhile, checked callers’ identities as it handled business over the phone.
Aviva had rehearsed a disruption of similar scale about two weeks earlier, its chief executive told Reuters. On Friday, the insurer sent out backup dial-in numbers for its earnings calls. For a business in Cyprus, the equivalent could be as simple as keeping a list of key phone numbers somewhere staff can reach it when they can’t open their inbox.
