Microsoft’s 3rd Crash in Two Weeks

For the 3rd time in ten days, a major Microsoft outage has rendered Office 365 completely useless. Users of Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint were without service for over five hours on Sept. 28, four hours on Oct. 1, and for intermittent periods of time today, Oct. 7.

These outages have been impacting users across the world, but have been most intense in the United States, specifically the Northeast, Midwest, and much of California.

Are Hackers Causing the Crashes?

These outages are not suspected to be the result of malicious hacking. Per Microsoft, a chain of poorly-constructed internal updates has caused the interruptions. A company spokesperson said “At this time, we’ve seen no indication that this is the result of malicious activity.”

Update (10/23/2020): Microsoft since reversed course, confirming that these outages were in fact a result of malicious hacking activity. announced that it has successfully disrupted Trickbot’s botnet after it had ensnared some of its Office 365 users. The company submitted a legal request to take down the botnet infrastructure ran by hackers.

[Related: 6 Things to Know About the Latest Microsoft Cloud Outage]

Is This Covered By Cyber Insurance?

Yes. Evolve’s cyber policies provide $1,000,000 of dependent business interruption coverage triggered by a cyber event (hack attack) or system failure, after a 6 hour waiting period.

We agree to reimburse our insureds for income loss and extra expense sustained during the indemnity period as the direct result of an interruption to your business operations arising directly out of any sudden, unexpected and continuous outage of computer systems used directly by a supply chain partner (such as Microsoft).