由于微软部分服务发生全球性中断，许多企业和消费者无法通过数字渠道进行沟通，专家表示，这一事件进一步凸显了加拿大采用更多主权数字技术的必要性。
Many businesses and consumers were unable to communicate through digital channels as a global outage of some Microsoft services left people scrambling, and experts say this event further highlights the need for Canada to adopt more sovereign digital tech.
“加拿大基本上因为一家美国公司的部分服务器出现故障而‘停摆’，这一事实表明我们有多么依赖、多么脆弱，”西安大略大学汤普森创新讲席教授约书亚·皮尔斯说。
“The fact that Canada basically closed for business because one U.S. company had a glitch on some servers shows how dependent we are, how vulnerable we are,” says Joshua Pearce, who holds the Thompson Chair of Innovation at Western University.
周四，中断波及了与 Exchange Online 和电子邮件服务交互的广泛 Microsoft 365 产品。
On Thursday, the outage hit a wide range of Microsoft 365 offerings that interact with its Exchange Online and email services.
用户反映，包括 Outlook、Teams 和 AI 助手 Copilot 在内的服务均出现故障。截至发稿，微软表示大多数服务已恢复，但修复工作仍在进行中，截至周五下午 3 点，尚无完全恢复的时间表。
Services including Outlook, Teams and AI assistant Copilot were reported by users to be down. As of publication, Microsoft said most services had been restored but fixes were still ongoing and there was no timeline for full restoration as of 3:00 p.m. Friday.
此次中断造成的全部影响范围尚不清楚，但微软的更新显示，受影响地区涵盖北美至亚太地区，公司报告称，截至 1 月，其 365 套件服务拥有近 5 亿付费订阅。
The full extent of the fallout from the outage is unclear, but regions spanning North America to the Asia Pacific were included in Microsoft’s updates, and the company reported its 365 suite of services had nearly half a billion paid subscriptions as of January.
“我只是震惊于有多少白领工作依赖单一的微软产品，一旦它瘫痪，确实有很多人无法工作，”加拿大盾牌研究所政策研究助理艾米莉·奥斯本说。
“I was just shocked how much white collar work depends on the single Microsoft product, and when it’s down, really lots of people weren’t able to do their jobs,” says Emily Osborne, a policy research associate at the Canadian Shield Institute.
“在中断发生时，我们无法采取任何措施来应对——我们只能听任微软摆布，”她补充道。
“There was nothing we could do to sort of address the outage as it was happening — we were just helpless to Microsoft’s control,” she added.
“我们依赖的供应商如此之少，其中一家的服务停止运行就会对我们的经济造成巨大影响。” 每日国家新闻 甚至联邦政府也表示受到了此次中断的影响，据周五针对《环球新闻》请求发表的声明称。
“We depend on so few providers, and when the services of one of them stops working that has a huge impact on our economy.”Get daily National news Even the federal government said they were impacted by the outage, according to a statement in response to a Global News request Friday.
加拿大政府在微软服务中断期间受到了影响。人工智能与数字创新部长埃文·所罗门在一份声明中说：“确保政府数字服务安全、可靠且有韧性是一项优先事项，我们将继续本着这一目标评估我们的系统和依赖关系。”有哪些替代方案？
“The Government of Canada experienced impacts from the Microsoft service outage. Ensuring government digital services are secure, reliable and resilient is a priority, and we continually assess our systems and dependencies with that objective in mind,” said AI and Digital Innovation Minister Evan Solomon in a statement. What alternatives are there?
专家表示，分散对不同供应商的依赖，并拓展到一些大型美国公司之外，可以在出现问题时为企业和消费者提供更多选择。奥斯本表示，拥有更多主权数字供应商是加拿大可以努力的方向。
Diversifying reliance on different providers and expanding beyond some of the big American names can give businesses and consumers more options when a problem arises, experts say. Osborne says having more sovereign digital providers is something that Canada could work on.
奥斯本说：“政府当然也有发挥作用的空间。我们看到欧盟许多政府正在做出非常积极且具战略性的选择，摆脱对美国公司产品的依赖。这当然是加拿大可以考虑采取的做法，以增强我们的韧性。”
“There’s also certainly a role for the government to play. We’ve seen lots of governments in the EU making the very active and strategic choice to move away from products delivered by American firms. So that’s certainly something that Canada could consider doing to increase our resilience,” says Osborne.
“一次性更换所有系统很难，但肯定有理由从某个小处着手，采用某种主权政府通信平台——一种保护隐私的微软产品替代方案。”环球新闻向加拿大联邦政府的IT服务提供商共享服务部（SSC）发去置评请求，询问是否正在开发或考虑使用某种主权数字通信软件。共享服务部的一位发言人确认收到请求，但截至发稿时未作出回应。
“It would be hard to switch everything all at once, but there’s certainly an argument to be made for starting somewhere small with some sort of government communication platform that is a sovereign alternative — a privacy-preserving alternative to Microsoft products.”Global News sent a request for comment to Shared Services Canada (SSC), the federal government’s IT provider, asking if a form of sovereign digital communications software is being developed or considered for use. A SSC spokesperson acknowledged the request, but did not provide a response by publication.
在欧盟，一项名为“Euro-Office”的服务是一套基于云的数字主权举措，于今年推出，旨在作为微软365等美国平台的替代方案。
In the EU, a service known as Euro-Office is a suite of cloud-based digital sovereignty initiatives launched this year to serve as an alternative to American platforms like Microsoft 365.
多伦多大学信息学院副教授埃文·莱特说：“我们需要讨论的真正数据主权或数字主权，是我们所使用的物理基础设施和软件。”
“This is the actual data sovereignty or digital sovereignty we need to talk about is the physical infrastructure and the software that we use,” says Evan Light, associate professor at the faculty of information at the University of Toronto.
“这是一个开源办公套件，能做 Microsoft Office 能做的一切，但它是由欧盟开发的。它是开源的、免费的，旨在成为一个项目，让欧盟能够从这些紧密、脆弱的对美国软件的依赖中解绑。”Light 表示，这些系统可根据个别组织的需求进行定制和扩展，有助于限制故障的影响范围。
“It’s an open source office suite that does everything Microsoft Office does, but it’s developed by the European Union. It’s open source, it’s free, and it’s meant to be a project to sort of decouple the European Union from these tight, vulnerable things to American software.”Light says these systems can be tailored and scaled to individual organizations, which can help limit the impact of an outage.
“因此，我可以在多伦多大学为我的学院运行一台服务器，如果我们需要重启它，只会影响一百人，而不是数百万人。” 接下来该怎么做？
“So I could run a server here at U of T for my faculty, and if we need to reboot that thing, we’d reboot that thing and it affects a hundred people rather than millions.”What can be done next?
专家表示，企业和消费者也应为技术故障制定备选方案，包括维护替代通信服务，以帮助限制中断。
Experts says businesses and consumers should also have backup plans for technology failures, including maintaining alternative communications services to help limit disruptions.
“要从多归属和拥有多模态通信形式的角度思考，而不是养成一遍又一遍只使用单一服务的习惯，”多伦多大学媒体经济学副教授 Brett Caraway 说。
“Thinking in terms of multi-homing and then having sort of multimodal forms of communication at your disposal rather than just getting into the habit of using one service all the time over and over and over again,” says Brett Caraway, associate professor of media economics at the University of Toronto.
“机构我认为需要更仔细地考虑，如果失去了某样东西会怎么办。你必须推演一下。”
“Institutions, I think, need to think more carefully about what they would do if they lost something. You’ve got to game that out.”
“拥有集中协调系统带来了很多便利和效率，但也让你面临巨大的风险。”—— 环球新闻 Uday Rana 供稿
“There’s a lot of convenience and a lot efficiency that comes out of having a centralized coordination system, but it also exposes you to a great deal of risk.”– with files from Global News’ Uday Rana