Back to the “good old” school textbook. This Friday, November 13, Marianne, a history and geography teacher in Paris, had to revise her course schedule in a hurry. Since the start of the day, she has not been able to access OneDrive, Microsoft's online storage service, on which she keeps all of her educational documents, lessons and exercises for students. Like this professor, who responded to a call for testimonies from franceinfo, several million workers in more than 70 countries are facing an outage affecting certain services of the American digital giant. Messaging inaccessible, calendars unavailable… These are sometimes working days that need to be reorganized, if you cannot work.
“I can't project any of the documents stored on my drive and I no longer know where the different classes are,” explains Marianne. “So I had to improvise materials for my students in five minutes this morning while trying to remember my original document.” For the rest of the day, the historian preferred to bring out her old textbooks. She finds the mishap all the more frustrating because she thought she had chosen security: "I chose OneDrive, telling myself that Microsoft was a reliable provider. This is the first time I can't count on this service."
“I had to dictate the URL to him, character by character”
In Maine-et-Loire, in Angers, Marion also had a bitter experience. This digital mediator in five Angevin social centers supports residents on a daily basis in their online administrative procedures. An activity for which Outlook, Microsoft's messaging service, "is an essential work tool", she assures. Her colleagues record appointments there, while she organizes her workshops, meetings and interventions with users. However, since Friday morning, she no longer has access to her emails or her calendar. It is therefore impossible to consult the residents' requests and support them as she usually would.
In the morning, an elderly resident asked him to send her by email a link to the government site allowing her to simulate her social rights and to support her in this process. “But I couldn’t send it to him by email, so I dictated the URL address to him, character by character,” breathes Marion. “It was very laborious for her, she pointed out to me that she preferred it when I sent her clickable links,” she adds.
A paradox, for someone responsible for helping residents master digital tools. “This is precisely the kind of difficulty that we are trying to overcome in our job as digital mediator,” points out Angevine. “We continue to work, but with greatly reduced means of communication and organization.”
Medical appointments difficult to organize
In Hauts-de-Seine, the outage also disrupts Noémie's work. This 45-year-old nurse works within a mobile psychiatric team which operates in 11 municipalities in the department with patients referred by doctors or nursing homes, in order to carry out psychiatric assessments. “However, in our Outlook calendars, we have all our appointments with patients, and all our emails with our partners,” emphasizes the caregiver. “Often, at the end of the week, we call patients for whom we have scheduled a visit. There, I can’t do anything,” she gets annoyed.
If his team was able to secure an appointment in the morning, it is however impossible to confirm the next ones. “I know that on Monday, there is none, but on Tuesday, I don’t know,” explains Noémie. She nevertheless ensures that the situation remains “relatively” under control, with her patient files being centralized on another tool. “Fortunately, our team does not take care of emergencies,” she puts things into perspective.
“Beyond Tuesday, it will get really complicated”
For some companies, the consequences could also be financial. In Ariège, Sébastien, manager of a training company, is at a standstill. “It’s technical unemployment,” breathes the business manager, who continues as best he can to answer his customers by telephone, but “cannot do miracles”. His Outlook email is essential to his work, because it allows him to receive the double authentication codes necessary to access the My Training Account platform. Without them, it is impossible to manage customer registration files or create new sessions. “I had to launch one this morning, I had to tell my client that it was not possible,” he explains.
Sébastien particularly fears a prolonged outage. After a training session, the organization has three days to declare the trainees' entry into training on the platform. “And if I don’t do it, I don’t get paid,” he emphasizes. The shortfall could quickly become a problem, with training representing between “1,500 and 4,000 euros” and his company sometimes being able to organize “several on the same day”. “I doubt that the outage will last several days, but if that is the case, beyond Tuesday, it will become really complicated,” Sébastien projects. Microsoft said at midday on Friday that it had noted “improvements” with a view to resolving the situation.
This mishap will in any case have made the witnesses who responded to franceinfo think about their dependence on Microsoft services. “It might be time to return to the paper calendar,” remarks Noémie. “Despite everything, we are not going to reorganize an entire professional system around an Outlook breakdown.”
