Global IT disruption highlights concentration, third-party risk

The severe issues that affected Windows users and Microsoft Azure customers around the world on Friday, July 19, 2024, are being described as the biggest IT service outage in history. This has taken business and governments aback — but while the precise nature of the issues was not foreseen, the likelihood of such an event was foreseeable. These incidents once again justify the industry’s concerns about market concentration, IT complexity and the risk posed by third parties.

The outage was caused by a combination of two apparently unrelated events: first, Microsoft Azure’s Central US public cloud region suffered more than five hours of downtime due to a configuration error, making it one of the longest cloud outages on record.