A critical Microsoft outage lasting more than 22 hours has prompted a question: are we too reliant on a few big tech companies?

The disruption, which left people unable to carry out tasks such as sending and receiving emails in Outlook, was caused by routine automated checks. These took some Microsoft servers offline, overloading the remaining servers with traffic.

About 430 million people globally use Microsoft 365, and problems were reported across more than 70 countries. Schools, courtrooms and even the Australian Intelligence Agency were among the many organisations affected.

Walter Pasquarelli, an AI strategist, told the BBC that the outage had laid bare businesses’ vulnerabilities and dependence. Gurgelay Oroz, a former software engineer, said the resulting disruption showed our reliance on a few large US corporations.

Microsoft has since apologised for the issue and says it will provide a full post-incident report once its review is complete.