A little more than a year before Microsoft’s systems crashed on Friday, creating global chaos in the banking, airline, and emergency service industries, the company pushed back against regulators investigating the risks of a handful of cloud services companies controlling the world’s technological infrastructure, according to documents we reviewed.
“Regulators should carefully avoid any intervention that might disturb the competitive offerings that have promoted the explosive innovation and growth attributable to the cloud,” the company wrote in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s 2023 review of cloud computing companies’ security practices and interoperability protocols.
The agency questioned whether these companies “invest sufficient resources in research and development” of systems upon which the economy and government rely.
Microsoft is blaming this week’s global cloud outages on an update from CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm whose software protects against hacks. The debacle comes two days after federal agencies released new guidance sounding additional alarms that Big Tech’s consolidation of cloud services could put consumers at serious risk. It also comes one day after Microsoft’s cloud services experienced a separate outage in certain parts of the United States.
“This is a CrowdStrike-caused outage. It would be inaccurate to report this as a Microsoft outage,” the company said in a statement. “A CrowdStrike update was responsible for bringing down a number of IT systems globally. We are actively supporting customers to assist in their recovery.”
CrowdStrike did not respond to a request for comment.
“All too often these days, a single glitch results in a system-wide outage, affecting…
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Auteur: Freddy Brewster
