It always starts small. A line of code, a rushed update, an innocent configuration tweak. On October 29, that “small thing” cascaded into something much bigger: a global disruption across Microsoft’s Azure and 365 services, hours before the company was due to release its quarterly earnings.
Our own platform felt the impact as well. For a few hours, some services were partially down, workflows slowed, and users experienced interruptions.
Suddenly, the Azure Portal was inaccessible. Microsoft’s consumer platforms were hit. Even Alaska Airlines had to pause parts of its operations. By late afternoon, Microsoft confirmed what many had already guessed, the culprit was likely an “inadvertent configuration change” in Azure Front Door, its content delivery network. In plain English: someone clicked something they shouldn’t have.
It’s easy to laugh about it now that services are recovering. But it’s also a sobering reminder that in the era of AI, automation, and trillion-dollar valuations, a single human click still has the power to bring the digital world to its knees.
The fragility behind the “cloud”
We love to imagine the cloud as something ethereal: flawless, self-healing, and immune to human frailty. Marketing departments tell us it’s “resilient” and “intelligent.” Engineers call it “fault-tolerant.” But the Azure outage reminded us that technology is never autonomous. It’s a mirror of the humans who build, maintain, and occasionally break it.
Microsoft described it as a configuration rollback. To us, it sounds like a very human oops moment. The kind of mistake that happens in every team, except this one triggered downtime for millions.
Modern infrastructure is both impressive and fragile: A single command, pushed at the wrong time, can ripple across continents. A misclick in Redmond, and suddenly someone in Copenhagen can’t log in to Teams.
It’s not the technology that failed; it’s our collective assumption that people won’t.
The human layer of risk
When we talk about “human risk,” we usually think of cybersecurity, phishing emails, weak passwords, insider threats. But operational human risk is the quiet sibling that rarely makes headlines until something crashes.
Human error drives the majority of large-scale tech incidents. Not because people are careless, but because systems are complex and humans are, well… human. We get tired. We misread documentation. We trust the wrong environment variable.
And in the high-stakes, high-speed world of cloud operations, small slips don’t stay small. They multiply through automation, faster, louder, and farther than any one person ever intended.
The irony? Automation is supposed to reduce human error. But when you automate at scale without designing for human fallibility, you don’t remove the risk, you amplify it.
Responding in real time
For nearly six hours, our platform was partially inaccessible due to Azure’s issues, affecting internal teams and users alike. While it wasn’t our fault, we treated it as if it were.
Our focus wasn’t just on systems; it was on people. We coordinated across teams, sent clear updates to users, and made quick decisions about which workflows to prioritize.
Our engineers double-checked data, validated system integrity, and kept the wheels turning as smoothly as possible. It was a vivid reminder that resilience isn’t built solely with code or redundancy; it’s built with clear processes, honest communication, and a team empowered to act when things go sideways.
Outages are inevitable, but how you respond, with transparency, empathy, and speed, is what truly defines trust and reliability.
When tech meets timing
There’s also something symbolic about when this outage happened.
A few hours before Microsoft’s quarterly earnings call. The company that powers global AI innovation suddenly couldn’t load its own investor relations page.
Moments like these humanize Big Tech in the most unflattering, and revealing, way. Behind the billion-dollar AI models and the flawless product demos are people, deadlines, fatigue, and pressure. The same messy ingredients that drive any workplace mistake.
Culture is infrastructure too
The conversation about “human error” often stops at the individual level: the person who made the click. But mistakes rarely happen in isolation. They happen in environments where documentation is rushed, psychological safety is weak, or processes are optimized for speed over sanity.
Every “oops” moment has cultural fingerprints. If people are afraid to ask questions, they don’t. If release schedules are unrealistic, quality slips. If leadership rewards uptime over wellbeing, burnout becomes an invisible risk factor.
So when we talk about resilience, we can’t just mean redundant servers. We need redundant humans, backup plans for when someone’s brain inevitably lags behind the sprint cycle.
Designing for resilience, not perfection
At Human Risks, we don’t think the answer is to eliminate humans from the loop. That fantasy leads to overautomation and brittle systems that fail spectacularly when something unexpected happens.
Instead, we should design with humans in mind. Build systems that notice a misstep before it spirals out of control. That alert that pops up just in time. That workflow that keeps running even when someone pushes to production by mistake.
It’s about humility in design. About building workflows that assume someone will eventually forget a semicolon or push to production instead of staging. Because someone will.
Aviation figured this out decades ago: checklists, redundancies, error-proof interfaces. Tech has the tools to do the same, but we’re still learning. Resilient systems don’t ignore human mistakes, they assume they will happen, and they make sure one slip doesn’t take down the entire operation.
Because here’s the reality: mistakes are inevitable. What’s not inevitable is letting them become disasters.
The cost of one click
By 7:40 p.m. ET, Microsoft reported “strong signs of improvement”. In cloud-speak, that means the fires were mostly out. But the broader lesson lingers: the cost of one click is measured not just in downtime, but in trust.
Trust from users, who expect reliability. Trust from companies, who build their businesses on Azure’s promise of uptime. And trust within teams, who need to know they can make mistakes without being crucified for them.
We live in an age where AI is supposed to make us superhuman. Yet every outage reminds us that the most critical part of any system, from servers to societies, is still deeply, fallibly human.
Maybe that’s not a bug. Maybe it’s the point.
Because the future of resilience won’t come from pretending we’re perfect. It’ll come from designing systems, teams, and cultures that can handle the moment we’re not.
