Mark Gregory
The Microsoft outage appears to have been caused by a misconfiguration of networking systems and infrastructure. The impact has been global and highlights the risks associated with relying on cloud services. The loss of productivity will be in the tens of millions in Australia and tens of billions globally.
It is incumbent on the Australian government to ensure that big tech isolates Australia from outages of this type by having infrastructure and systems hosted locally. There should be a mechanism for Australian businesses to claim compensation and for the Government to fine big tech for outages that impact productivity.
The failure of Microsoft to ensure that best engineering practices were adhered to identifies how important it is for businesses to have tech risk management plans and alternatives in place to minimise the cost of tech outages.