Out of Office: Are we too reliant on Microsoft?

Luke Wilson (0:00)

Microsoft services begin to return to normal after hours of disruption. It's World Business Express from the BBC World Service. I'm Luke Wilson. Questions over the Trump administration's links to Nvidia and why it's all about the solar haves and have nots in Pakistan.

Wherever you are in the world, if you went to start your working day and couldn't get access to your email, you're not alone.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

All right, whoever's working on fixing Microsoft Outlook right now, just take your time.

SPEAKER_3 (0:36)

Hello, this is IT.

SPEAKER_2 (0:37)

Outlook's down.

SPEAKER_3 (0:38)

Yep, yep, there's a service outage. Microsoft's working on it.

SPEAKER_2 (0:42)

Well, I need my email.

SPEAKER_3 (0:45)

Right, yeah, that's been the general feedback so far. Yeah, well, you know what?

Luke Wilson (0:50)

They better work harder, because this is ruining my day.

Randip Somal (0:52)

I actually had a cry earlier about this.

SPEAKER_3 (0:54)

They better work harder.

Randip Somal (0:55)

I'm going to call them after this. Well, they might be quite busy, but why did you cry? Well, no, because Microsoft is my life.

Luke Wilson (1:02)

Businesses, governments and public services in more than 70 countries have been hit by an outage affecting Microsoft's 365 software, which has more than 430 million paid accounts. Microsoft says it's not down to a cyber attack and that services are stabilising, but that they've still not returned to normal for everyone. Between them, Microsoft, Amazon and Google provide more than 60% of the world's cloud computing services. So is there too much power with too few providers? I asked Caitlin Egan, Digital Risks Director at Control Risks.

Caitlin Egan (1:36)

There's an absolute risk in the form of a concentration risk that is introduced by this dominance of a handful of key infrastructure operators in saying that major technology providers obviously bring significant benefits in terms of capability, scale and security for global organisations. But what has happened is that the application layer, many of the technologies that we rely upon that seem a quite diversified ecosystem, actually share the same underlying infrastructure. So a single disruption like the disruption we've had can affect many different services and activities at once. But I think for businesses, the practical response here is to understand which dependencies are critical, what disruption they can tolerate and how they keep essential services running. So this allows organisations to benefit from these platforms, whilst also understanding the risks that these platforms might also introduce based on that concentration and helping them manage their exposure responsibly.

Luke Wilson (2:35)

How do you think they get to a place where if this were to happen again, it doesn't cause as much disruption next time?

Caitlin Egan (2:42)

There was a lot of focus placed on backup planning when it came to redundancy. So to give a very practical example, you can have a backup for a server, but a lot of these servers might actually rest on the same underlying infrastructure. So suddenly your backup is not a backup or a viable option.

Luke Wilson (3:01)

Caitlin Egan from Control Risks. US. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has been summoned to testify publicly to a Senate committee next month as scrutiny grows over the Trump administration's links to the scandal hit chipmaker Nvidia. He's been summoned along with the firm's founder Jensen Huang, who resigned on Thursday over an affair with a suspected Chinese spy.

Jeff Herbst spent 20 years as Nvidia's Vice President of Business Development. He's now co-founding managing partner of GFT Ventures.

Jeff Herbst (3:30)

I think what Nvidia needs to do, the board and the executive team, is they need to calm the shareholder base. They need to explain what's going to happen next. And they have a great opportunity next week on their earnings call. And I'm pretty certain that the results of that call are going to be spectacular. And we've known for a while that not only Nvidia, but a lot of the memory companies have sold out all potential inventory for the next one to two years. Collect takes over at a good time as any because the company is firing on all cylinders.

Luke Wilson (4:03)

Thomas Jemaine is co-host of the BBC's The Interface podcast. He told me this is a pivotal moment for the company.

Thomas Germain (4:10)

Now that Jensen Huang is hanging up his signature leather jacket, whether or not Nvidia is going to be able to forge its own identity here and prove that it can stand on its own feet, or whether it'll be tied too much to his identity and things will be shaky from here on out.

Luke Wilson (4:28)

And still a lot of questions for both Jensen Huang and Nvidia.