我们都经历过这种情况：WiFi 断了，需要找人来修，但得先闯过有线电视公司那些愚蠢的 AI 机器人关卡才能联系上真人。现在想象一下，你是一家市值 4 万亿美元的公司，全球都急需你马上解决电脑故障，但你却把三分之一的员工“献祭”给了 AI。
We’ve all been there: Your WiFi is down and you need a human to fix it, but first you have to run the gauntlet of the cable company’s dimwitted AI robots to access one. Now imagine you’re a $4 trillion company and the entire planet needs your computer problems fixed, like, yesterday, but you’ve sacrificed a third of your human employees to AI.
截至周五上午，微软公司仍未完全修复其 Outlook、Teams、AI 助手 Copilot 以及十多项其他服务的中断，故障始于近一天前。此次中断并非由俄罗斯或朝鲜黑客造成，而是源于普通的糟糕代码——“一个核心流程”显然“性能焦虑”发作，在服务器机房地板上蜷缩成一团“痛哭流涕”。其他代码出于“同情”也随之崩溃，公司工程师至今尚未能完全哄骗它们恢复健康。
As of Friday morning, Microsoft Corp. had still not completely repaired outages of its Outlook, Teams, AI assistant Copilot and more than a dozen other services that began nearly a day earlier. The outage wasn’t caused by Russian or North Korean hackers but by plain old bad code, “a core process” that apparently got performance anxiety and curled up into a ball, sobbing, on the server-room floor. Other code collapsed in sympathy, and the company’s engineers haven’t yet fully coaxed them back to health.
十八小时过去了，这家本应处于 AI 矛尖尖端的庞大公司，能说的最好消息只是情况“正在好转”。除非你身在亚洲，那里仅有“令人鼓舞的恢复信号”。对于日本、澳大利亚、菲律宾及其他数个国家的政府而言，这恐怕只能算微弱安慰，因为它们仍无法登录 Outlook，导致无法为民众提供服务。
Eighteen hours later, the best this massive company, supposedly near the pointy end of the AI spear, could say was that things were looking up. Unless you were in Asia, where there were merely “encouraging recovery signals.”That will be slim comfort to the governments of Japan, Australia, the Philippines and several other countries still unable to serve their citizens because they can’t get into their Outlook.
全球约 4.5 亿客户为 Microsoft 365 订阅支付真金白银，客户群包括政府、公共服务部门和其他大型企业。这些客户的许多员工过去一天都在庆祝从 Outlook、Teams 等不受喜爱的工作工具中强制“放假”，并反思 Slack 和 Zoom 等竞争对手的优势。
About 450 million customers around the world pay good money for Microsoft 365 subscriptions, including governments, public services and other massive corporations. Many of their employees have spent the past day celebrating a forced vacation from Outlook, Teams and other unloved work tools and reflecting on the positives of competitors such as Slack and Zoom.
微软365的客户还包括那些当今全球经济依赖的AI公司，例如Anthropic和OpenAI。这颇具讽刺意味，因为微软参与AI革命，今年引发了一系列大规模裁员。为帮助覆盖2026年高达1750亿美元的AI支出，该公司5月向7%的员工提供买断方案，7月再裁减2%，上个月又向高达27%的员工提供更多买断方案。
Microsoft 365 customers also include the AI companies, such as Anthropic and OpenAI, upon which the global economy depends these days. That’s ironic, because Microsoft’s involvement in the AI revolution has inspired a series of major layoffs of human beings this year. To help cover its $175 billion in AI spending in 2026, the company offered buyouts to 7% of its workforce in May, cut another 2% in July and then offered still more buyouts to a massive 27% just last month.
这些离职员工的缺席是否有助于迅速结束甚至避免“2026年365大危机”？目前无法断言，但我们知道，正如首席执行官萨提亚·纳德拉（Satya Nadella）所吹嘘的，微软至少30%的新代码现在由AI编写。互联网迅速注意到，30%与公司今年裁员比例相差无几。类似的梗图大量涌现，其中这张就是周五Reddit上最热门的帖子之一：这也不是微软今年首次出现此类惨剧。7月另一个软件漏洞导致其美国西部Azure数据中心与网络其他部分断连，引发北美数小时的服务中断。
Could the presence of those missing employees have helped quickly end or even avoid the Great 365 Crisis of 2026? It’s impossible to say at this moment, but we do know that at least 30% of Microsoft’s new code is now written by AI, as CEO Satya Nadella has bragged. And the Internet quickly noticed that 30% isn’t far from the percentage of employees the company has sent packing this year. Memes, like this one that was among Friday’s most popular posts on Reddit, abounded: Nor is this Microsoft’s first such debacle this year. Another software bug in July cut off its West US Azure data center from the rest of its network and caused hours-long outages across North America.
但这一切都未影响微软股价。投资者为每一次裁员和AI支出宣布欢呼，因为其专注AI的Azure云服务收入飙升，推动公司股价本月早些时候创下历史新高。
None of this has been a problem for Microsoft’s stock price. Investors have celebrated every layoff and AI spending announcement, as revenue from its AI-focused Azure cloud service has soared, taking the company’s shares to an all-time high earlier this month.
但投资者开始对AI繁荣感到不安，质疑巨额资本支出的明智性，并从美国中期选举结果到黄仁勋（Jensen Huang）的感情生活等方面都看到见顶迹象。微软或许正在吸纳更多Azure客户，但即便对这些VIP客户，其服务记录也并非无瑕。一旦AI浪潮退去，微软很可能会后悔在此过程中对待其他客户如此恶劣。
But investors are starting to get antsy about the AI boom, questioning the wisdom of the massive capital spending involved and seeing signs of the top in everything from the US midterm results to Jensen Huang’s love life. Microsoft may be racking up Azure customers, but its service record even for those VIPs hasn’t been spotless. If and when the AI tide rolls out, then Microsoft could well regret treating the rest of its customers so badly in the process.