Microsoft 365 services are slowly recovering from a prolonged outage that has handed critics of single-vendor dependence a particularly unwelcome case study. Ever wondered what it would be like if your IT supplier abruptly pulled the plug? Perhaps the result of a mood swing by an unpredictable political leader? For affected Microsoft customers, the disruption has offered an unwelcome preview. Email? Gone. Messaging with Teams? Iffy. Collaboration? Nope. The list of problems in what Microsoft delicately called a "Service Degradation" is breathtaking. The company put the incident’s start at 1826 GMT on November 12. Exchange Online fell over. Viewing recently used files in the Microsoft 365 application was problematic. Copilot threw a wobbly. Microsoft 365 Education was affected (unfortunate, considering the changes the company has made ), and so on. At 1401 GMT on November 13, Microsoft reported: "We’re continuing to see improvements in service availability," but the damage has surely been done. If the outage halted work at your organization, then questions will have to be asked. Even Microsoft’s rivals had some sympathy for the engineers and administrators dealing with the problems. Jos Poortvliet, co-founder of Nextcloud, told The Register : "Mistakes happen in the IT industry. This holds true for companies of all sizes, including us. Our heart goes out to all the admins today. "This incident shows how dependent organizations are on a single ecosystem…