A disruption to Microsoft 365 this week has prompted technology experts to warn UAE businesses that relying on a single cloud platform without a fallback plan carries a serious operational risk.
Microsoft has said its servers failed automated health checks and that it has found no sign of an attack. Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Ombori, said that makes it a reliability event that “could happen to any large provider”.
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Experts stressed that Microsoft 365 underpins far more than email. Hassellöf said it sits at the centre of communication, documents, sign-in and approvals, so applications that depend on it for access can stall too.
Morey Haber, Chief Security Advisor at BeyondTrust, said companies can lose Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams at the same time. For UAE firms working across international time zones, even a few hours of downtime can disrupt transactions, customer engagement and decisions well beyond a single business day.
“My concern is not that Microsoft experienced an outage,” Haber said. His worry is that many organisations have built their entire productivity ecosystem around one provider “without adequately planning for an outage”.
AI tools went down too
Chris Miglino, CEO of Axe Compute, said the outage also took Copilot offline, halting AI-assisted drafting, summarising and document searches. That matters in the UAE, where Microsoft’s research put generative AI use at 73.3 per cent of the working-age population in the second quarter, the highest in its global rankings.
“The deeper the adoption, the larger the share of work that pauses,” Miglino said.
The experts agreed that healthcare and government are among the most vulnerable, though they differed on other sectors. Hassellöf said education is exposed because an outage hits many students and teachers at once, and real estate sees delays in documents, approvals and client communication. Haber included banking among the most vulnerable, while Hassellöf noted that core payment systems usually run separately, so the impact there is mostly on internal workflows and customer service.
They stressed that the key question is whether a company loses productivity tools or the ability to deliver an essential service. Haber gave the example of a hospital: losing collaboration tools is inconvenient, but losing access to systems needed for patient care can become a safety concern.
The real cost
Hassellöf said lost staff hours are the smallest part of the financial hit. The larger cost is business that cannot happen during downtime, such as a delayed property transfer, a missed financial approval or an unanswered customer queue. He advised companies to price downtime by business function, as one missed approval can cost more than a day of lost office productivity.
Hassellöf described preparedness as uneven. Haber said organisations have invested heavily in cybersecurity and digital transformation, but operational resilience has not received the same attention. A backup is of little use, both said, if staff cannot sign in, reach applications or communicate.
“If your emergency communications, identity management and recovery procedures all depend on the same unavailable cloud provider, your recovery plan has a fundamental weakness,” Haber said.
Hassellöf added that AI-driven attacks are accelerating, citing CrowdStrike’s October report that likely agentic intrusions this half-year are running at about three times the level of the first half.
What companies can do
The experts recommended:
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an emergency communication channel and administrator access that do not depend on the failed platform
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regular testing of prolonged cloud-outage scenarios
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a decision on how long the business can run in a degraded state
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continuity plans that cover critical AI workloads, including where they run and what takes over if a service fails
Hassellöf said Ombori’s PhyGrid and PhyStack platforms help companies own and control more of the systems they cannot afford to lose, alongside private infrastructure and locally hosted AI models. Cloud providers, he said, remain part of the picture.
BeyondTrust offers privileged access management, secure remote access and remote support to keep emergency accounts available during disruptions. Haber was clear that the company does not replace Microsoft 365 or restore unavailable email.
Miglino, whose company supplies dedicated GPU capacity for AI workloads, said that as enterprises move AI from pilots into production, “the reliability of the capacity underneath will weigh as heavily as the model on top”.
Haber summed up the lesson: the question is not whether Microsoft will have another disruption, but whether businesses can keep operating when it happens, whichever provider is affected.
Source: Khaleej Times