我们或许生活在一个即时通讯应用和人工智能的时代，但正如本周约5亿人所发现的那样，老式的电子邮件也相当重要。
We may live in an age of messaging apps and artificial intelligence, but as about half a billion people discovered this week, good old-fashioned email is pretty important, too.
美国东部时间周四下午12点30分左右，微软云服务故障导致该公司的电子邮件和其他服务下线。此次中断使全球许多地区——从医疗系统到证券交易所，再到英国议会议员——失去了主要的沟通工具之一。这堪称科技界的“雪天停摆日”。
Starting around 12:30 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, a Microsoft cloud outage knocked the company’s email and other services offline. The interruption left swaths of the globe, from healthcare systems to stock exchanges to members of U.K. Parliament, without one of their main tools for communicating.
原因是服务器升级出错，随后故障在全球范围内连锁扩散。这一天让人想起2024年网络安全公司CrowdStrike导致850万台Windows系统崩溃时引发的混乱。
It was the tech world’s equivalent of a snow day. The cause was a server upgrade gone wrong, which then cascaded globally.
一些用户感到沮丧。一些人干脆放下工作。还有人仿佛穿越回了电话时代。
It was a day reminiscent of the chaos caused in 2024 when the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike crashed 8.5 million Windows systems. Some users were frustrated. Some simply checked out from work.
技术服务公司Envision Technology Advisors的首席技术官斯蒂芬·罗斯说，公司的支持人员昨天一直在打电话向客户解释他们的电子邮件为什么不能用。
Others time-traveled back to the telephone era.
罗斯说，Envision的客户当天一早就开始联系公司，但由于电子邮件中断，他们只能转而使用电话。于是他们打来了电话。“我们的服务台完全瘫痪了，”他说。
Support staff at Envision Technology Advisors, a technical services company, spent yesterday on the phone explaining to customers why their email wasn’t working, said Stephen Rose, the company’s chief technology officer. Invision’s customers began reaching out early in the day, but with email cut off, they had to turn to the telephone, Rose said. So they called.
罗斯的团队告诉来电者，故障不是Envision造成的，而是微软。他说：“你只能希望消息能通过电话口口相传。”
“Our service desk got totally paralyzed,” he said. Rose’s team told callers that Envision wasn’t to blame for the outage; Microsoft was.
世界各地因电子邮件中断而受影响的机构纷纷鼓励客户通过电话联系，包括新斯科舍省哈利法克斯的一家自来水公司、底特律的轻轨系统以及澳大利亚的东吉普斯兰地区。
“You hope that it gets out by word of telephone,” he said.
在美国，各地市政府都失去了电子邮件服务，包括佛罗里达州坦帕、肯塔基州路易斯维尔以及洛杉矶县法医局。众议院也受到影响。航运公司马士基和欧洲交易所运营商泛欧交易所同样未能幸免。在英格兰，国家医疗服务体系是受此次故障影响的多个政府机构之一。
Email-deprived entities around the world encouraged customers to reach out via phone, including a water utility in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Detroit’s light-rail system; and the East Gippsland region of Australia. In the U.S., city governments across the country lost email, including Tampa, Fla.; Louisville, Ky.; and the County of Los Angeles Medical Examiner. The House of Representatives was hit too. As was the shipping company Maersk and European exchange operator Euronext.
英国公共资助的医疗服务提供机构林肯郡合作NHS基金会信托专门从事心理健康服务，该机构发布了一份新闻稿，为停电期间的患者提供指导。声明说：“我们请求，如果您今天需要转诊，或者您正经历危机，请此时致电我们的服务部门，而不是发送电子邮件。”
In England, the National Health Service was among several government agencies affected by the outage. The Lincolnshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust, a British publicly funded healthcare provider that specializes in mental health services, put out a press release with instructions for patients during the outage.
微软表示，此次故障影响了一系列Microsoft 365服务，但主要集中在Exchange Online和电子邮件服务上。消息和视频聊天平台Microsoft Teams对许多人来说仍然可用，这引发了抱怨。“亲爱的@微软——你关错了。请把我们的电子邮件打开，关掉Teams。真诚的，所有人，”佛罗里达州政治策略师史蒂夫·沙尔在X上写道。
“We would ask that if you need to make a referral today, or you are experiencing a crisis please call our services rather than email at this time,” the statement said. The outage affected a range of Microsoft 365 services, but it centered on Exchange Online and email services, Microsoft said. Microsoft Teams, a messaging and video chat platform, remained up for many, prompting complaints.
对于纽约市一家会计师事务所的合伙人杰弗里·迈克尔森来说，这次故障成了一个意外的机会，让他得以从待办事项清单上划掉几项。周四下午早些时候，迈克尔森注意到收件箱里没有收到任何新邮件。就在日落前把女儿送到空手道课后，他意识到当晚剩余时间可能都收不到邮件了。于是他动手搭建了两个书架，妻子一个月来一直催他完成这件事。“说实话，感觉还挺不错的，”迈克尔森说。第二天，他一大早醒来，发现有70封未读邮件。
“Dear @ Microsoft – you shut down the wrong one. Please turn our email back on and kill Teams. Sincerely, Everyone,” wrote Steve Schale, a political strategist based in Florida, on For Jeffrey Michelson, a partner at an accounting firm based in New York City, the outage became a welcome chance to check a few items off his to-do list. Michelson noticed he wasn’t getting any new emails in his inbox in the early afternoon on Thursday. After dropping his daughter off at karate lessons just before sunset, he realized he might not be receiving emails for the rest of the evening. So he got to work building two bookshelves that his wife had been asking him to complete for a month. “It was kind of nice, I’m not gonna lie,” said Michelson. The next day, he woke up in the early morning to 70 unread emails.
就像放雪假一样，周四对一些人来说很有趣，但对那些依赖微软云完成工作的人来说就不那么美好了。“孩子们喜欢雪假，”Envision的罗斯说。“父母们则想，‘天哪，这些孩子一整天都得待在家里。’这完全取决于你怎么看。”这次故障对某些人的影响比其他人大。总部位于底特律地区的工业公司Workhorse Group因故障不得不将第三季度财报电话会议改期至下周。
Like any snow day, Thursday was fun for some but not so great for people who depended on Microsoft’s cloud to get their work done. “Kids love a snow day,” Envision’s Rose said. “Parents go, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got these kids inside the house all day.’ It’s all a matter of perspective.”The outage was more disruptive for some than others. Workhorse Group, an industrial company based in the Detroit area, had to reschedule its third-quarter earnings call to the following week because of the outage.
公司发言人约翰·威廉姆斯说：“我们的经历（显然，和许多其他公司一样）表明，拥有实时通信、获取文件以及与他人共享文件的能力是多么重要。”他是通过短信发表上述评论的。
“Our experience (clearly, like many others) shows how vital it is to have real-time communications, access to documents and the ability to share documents with others,” said company spokesman John Williams. He sent his comment via text message.
微软发言人称，公司并未遭到黑客攻击。他说，这是一次网络升级出了问题。他说：“鉴于需求规模，我们逐步恢复了服务，并在每个阶段验证稳定性。虽然耗时更长，但这有助于确保稳定恢复。”
A Microsoft spokesman said the company wasn’t hacked. It was a network upgrade gone wrong, he said. “Given the scale of demand, we restored services gradually, validating stability at each stage. While this took longer, it helped ensure a stable restoration,” he said.
网络公司Infoblox的互联网分析主管道格·马多里说，此次中断持续了约19个小时。
The blackout lasted about 19 hours, said Doug Madory, head of internet analysis at the networking company Infoblox.
在X平台上，微软首席执行官萨蒂亚·纳德拉对此次故障只字未提。这并不完全令人意外。他去年对彭博社说：“我是个用电子邮件打字的人。”
On X, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella was silent on the outage. That is not a complete surprise. “I’m an email typist,” he told Bloomberg last year.