The U.S. tech giant reported “encouraging recovery progress” Friday after a key cloud service needed for numerous business and consumer applications went down Thursday. Microsoft provisionally ascribed the outage to a failure in the system that makes sure its servers are in working order. That is, the real problem might have been not in the servers themselves, but in a tool that’s supposed to confirm that they’re functioning. (The Logic)

Talking point: For many Microsoft-dependent organizations (including hospitals, universities and federal, provincial and municipal governments in Canada), it was as if they’d suffered a massive cyberattack. A prolonged Outlook email outage was the most obvious sign for many users, but Exchange Online—which lets customers use Microsoft-hosted servers instead of running their own—underlies everything from the Copilot chatbot to cloud printing services. The company promised a full report on what went wrong and what it’s doing to prevent a recurrence. After an initial dip, Microsoft’s share price had surpassed yesterday’s closing price by midday.

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