Friday the 13th turned out to be very unlucky indeed for Microsoft. A major outage of the tech giant’s services put a halt to digital communication for millions across the world.
So after UK government warnings to prepare for a possible cyber-attack, perhaps the bigger threat to the online world is simply the fragile design of internet infrastructure.
That fragility was plain to see on November 13. Emails and video calls stopped working as Microsoft struggled to fix “connectivity problems”.
The crash caused massive disruption to public services including hospitals and schools.
At the time of writing, what caused the outage remains unclear. But whatever it was also highlights the risks of market concentration, where a relatively small number of powerful corporations have become responsible for providing and maintaining most of the digital services on which we depend.
Microsoft has previously presented that dominance as a corporate strength. The company once claimed that serving billions of customers gives their global digital ecosystem a “unique vantage point”.
But while this level of market domination is good for business, it is not necessarily good for infrastructural resilience.
The internet has become increasingly dominated by a relatively small number of powerful corporations. The expansion of cloud computing has accelerated this centralisation, concentrating the provision of computing resources in the hands of a few major companies.
As Friday 13th demonstrated, this level of concentration can lead to widespread disruption.
And it’s not even an isolated incident.
A similar outage revealed similar risks in July 2024 when a faulty security update crashed millions of systems that used Microsoft Windows. IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt, leaving pharmacies, airports and banks unable to operate.
Just last month, on October 22, AI testing revealed security vulnerabilities in a programme which underpinned roughly 70% of the world’s websites. Governments and businesses took thousands of sites and online services offline to prevent potential cyber-attacks and data theft.
A month before that, autonomous AI agents developed by OpenAI hacked government infrastructure.
So there are clearly weaknesses in the current design of the internet and its enormously complex ecosystem of interdependencies.
Power from the people
Those ecosystems are not just chips and wires. It can be easy to forget the people who deliver the digital services we often take for granted.
The internet depends upon extensive material infrastructure and the operation of that infrastructure is not automatic. It relies on a large human workforce, which operates amid demanding schedules, tight deadlines and the pressure to maintain uninterruptible services.
As an anthropologist who conducts fieldwork in the data centre industry, I have spent a lot of time with the people who work behind the screens of the digital world.
EPA/NEIL HALL
Where organisations are understaffed or place excessive demands on their employees, the capacity to undertake comprehensive testing, monitoring and diagnostic work may be compromised.
The burden of restoring services following the Microsoft outage will fall heavily on IT professionals across the affected organisations. Many of them will be required to work demanding hours to bring the disrupted systems back online.
The physical and psychological toll that major infrastructure failures can impose on these workers remains an important dimension of the wider costs of digital disruption.
All eggs inside one digital basket
And then there’s the social cost. Sociologists of risk have long argued that the vulnerabilities of technologically advanced societies stem, in part, from their growing dependence on complex and interconnected infrastructures.
The consolidation of digital infrastructure has concentrated considerable power and responsibility in the hands of a relatively small number of private corporations.
And the Microsoft incident illustrates the extent to which organisations have come to place their operational continuity in the hands of major technology providers.
Microsoft’s infrastructure underpins an enormous range of everyday activities – activities undertaken by schools and hospitals, by businesses and charities.
When these services become unavailable, the consequences extend far beyond the immediate inconvenience of being unable to access an email account. Organisations, vital public services and even nation states which outsource essential aspects of their digital operations to a single provider can find themselves unable to function when that provider experiences a major failure.
The growing dependence on a concentrated technology ecosystem therefore raises fundamental questions about digital resilience.
As societies become increasingly reliant on online services, the consequences of infrastructure failures could become more extensive – and more damaging.
