This Friday morning, at the office, Charlotte is drooling. The fault is Microsoft, victim of a global outage, which risks causing it to miss an important deadline. CFO of an industrial multinational, she must submit a project over which she has control. But Outlook, the famous professional email box which has more than 400 million users around the world, is in crisis. “I have a loop of emails where twenty people are copied to follow up and obviously, for some of them, apart from the email, I have no other contact…” Fun fact: Charlotte works for a multinational in the industry. So no miracle solution. Except for DIY and a few calls for help. Force majeure!
So what to do on this Friday morning, when the most commonly used communication tools fail? For certain French employees and self-employed workers, those who “closed a deal” or negotiated a major change, it’s a hassle. For others, it’s a nice respite. Some even took the opportunity to flood social networks with memes suggesting that Microsoft not fix the flaw too quickly.
“This morning we were in the final exchanges by email”
But for Laura, a real estate agent, it’s a nightmare. She was just finalizing the sale of a Parisian apartment, the behind the scenes of which was quite chaotic, not to say tumultuous. The final discussions with the notaries are underway. “This morning we were in the final exchanges by email,” she explains. This breakdown was therefore an additional frustration just before the weekend, especially since everyone is on edge. »
Béatrix, in her fifties, who works in publishing, had to think of a backup solution to send documents to another department in her company. “I went to see them and we exchanged our Yahoo addresses. There were three of us who had one! I thought I was the last… It’s the marker of a generation! We laughed and told ourselves that we shouldn't let people know that we had kept these mailboxes from another time. It could be of use to us if we are looking for work!”
At mid-morning, Étienne, salesman for a coworking player, was already in his car on the way to Perche for the weekend: he was thinking of having a busy Friday but this breakdown excited his interlocutors. “It’s been years since I received so many calls on a Friday morning, it’s quite disturbing,” he explains. Especially when you're behind the wheel!
“It disrupted the work a lot”
Camille, management controller, who is teleworking in Boulogne-Billancourt, was not particularly impacted by the outage but complains to her work colleagues: “It is obviously very problematic for those who have to manage weekend emergencies”.
“Our schedules became lighter this morning,” notes Gaëlle Mercier, communications director at Wavestone, an AI transformation firm. More seriously, this outage obviously raised a subject of business continuity. We have seen, whether on projects with clients, but also at home, to what extent we are dependent on these tools. There are processes that we will have to re-examine. “It’s an opportunity to do better, to organize crisis exercises to compensate for this lack of preparation” for this type of event.
This observation made, Gaëlle Mercier however noticed this morning that she and her colleagues “have rediscovered the virtue of exchanging face to face, where we all tend to be a little with our heads in the handlebars, in front of our computers. Today, in the cafeterias, people stopped and talked. And then, some rediscovered the virtue of the telephone. However, we should not romanticize what happened. It disrupted the work a lot and it also revealed major weaknesses in companies and a significant phenomenon of dependence. This outage also reminded us of the importance of preserving human relationships that do not rely solely on emails. Face-to-face exchanges and telephone calls remain essential to maintain connections, streamline interactions and maintain proximity, particularly in our customer relationships.”
