JEDDAH/RIYADH: If you ever wondered what life would be like without email — now you know.
Disruption to Microsoft 365 left up to 450 million users worldwide without access to the Outlook email client and the Teams collaboration app from late on Thursday and throughout Friday.
The chaos reached classrooms, forcing schools to find alternative ways to share learning materials. “My daughter’s assessments are starting, and the disruption has made it difficult to download the test materials from Microsoft Teams,” parent Zainab Rahman said. “In the meantime, they are sharing the materials through WhatsApp.
Mohammed Ahmed, a leather business owner, told Arab News: “It has become harder to respond to customers promptly, follow up on orders and manage routine business activities.”
The unavailability of Microsoft’s cloud services “affected our ability to coordinate activities and carry out routine tasks,” said Sameer Sayed, IT manager at clothing retailer Giordano.
Daipayan Adhikari of the United Warehouse Company said the outage had disrupted customs clearance, truck scheduling and container transport operations. He urged businesses to have alternative communication channels and business continuity plans, a message repeated by Khedr Al Sayed of Natro Legal Associates. “The next outage may not be so considerate. If it starts on a Sunday morning, the impact on Saudi businesses will be very different,” he said.
