Over the past few days, a number of reports made headline news: At the beginning of the week, Microsoft announced problems with its Outlook service for private users. Many users were temporarily unable to access their email accounts via the web service or their email clients. Only a few days earlier, corporate customers in Germany had also been affected and within Microsoft 365, access to Exchange Online was severely impacted.

Now that the initial shock after the Crowdstrike incident has subsided, the first companies are starting to analyze the situation – regardless of whether they were affected themselves or escaped with a scare. One thing seems to be clear: very few people could have imagined such a large-scale outage caused by an update by some software actually designed to protect the system. However, it often doesn’t even have to be such a large-scale outage to suffer serious consequences for business operations.