Microsoft Goes Down, and the Media Business Takes Off Early

It’s not just you: The Runyon Canyon and Baldwin Hills trails are unusually busy. The New Jersey Transit trains to Montclair and Metro North trains to Westchester really are more crowded.

The media business took off early on Thursday, and the bosses can blame Microsoft.

The tech giant suffered a stunning global outage Thursday, putting Outlook, Teams, CoPilot and online version of Word, Excel and other software on ice, and work grinding (mostly) to a halt.

Inside one midtown Manhattan media office, one employee said that as soon as it became clear the services weren’t coming back soon, folks headed for the door, braving the rain to try and get home early. Inside one newsroom, the programming and newsgathering had to go on, but one staffer said that the conversations migrated to Slack and text chains.

The media business may still rely on old-fashioned technology: Film reels, cable wires and broadcast spectrum, but the internet has become its backbone, and an outage of this scale can grind an industry (or in this case much of the economy) to a halt.

But as eerie as the Microsoft-induced quiet is, it is what comes next that surely terrifies the media professionals: Any hopes of reaching inbox zero will be complicated by the inbox 1,000 waiting once the tech servers are back online.

Still, at least folks can get that early hike in before the sunset, or catch an earlier train (maybe even off-peak!) home.

The media business can get itself back in order Friday. If Microsoft lets it.