South Africans woke up on Friday 13 November, reached for their phones and discovered that Microsoft had not woken up with them. The superstitious felt vindicated.
For millions, the morning ritual is sacred. Before the kettle boils, before the dog goes out, before anyone has decided whether they like their family that day, they check email. Office workers do it. Executives do it. Even housewives hunting for school newsletters, plumber quotes and discount vouchers do it. Nothing says “I am a functioning adult” like 47 unread messages.
Except this morning, Outlook refused to cooperate. By midday it was still hiding somewhere in the cloud, and tempers unravelled at roughly the same speed as the little blue circle spinning on screens.
Grown adults reduced to refreshing desperately
Grown men refreshed their inboxes with the desperation of someone checking a lottery ticket. One colleague restarted her laptop, then restarted it again, then stared at it as though it owed her money. Somebody suggested “just phoning” the person they needed to reach, and received the same look you would give someone who proposed travelling to Johannesburg by ox wagon.
Some organisations came to a complete standstill. Not a slowdown, not a hiccup. A full, glassy-eyed stop. When email goes, so does the meeting that was scheduled by email, the document that was attached to the email, and the decision that was waiting for a reply to the email. Entire workplaces were reduced to people walking up and down corridors, asking “Is yours working?” in hushed tones, like mourners at a dull funeral.
The cruel part? The emails did not stop arriving. They piled up in some digital holding pen, breeding quietly, waiting to ambush workers on Monday morning. Whatever was lost on Friday will need catching up, probably during the weekend. Braais will be abandoned. Rugby will be watched with one eye and a laptop. Somewhere in the Winelands, a perfectly good Saturday will be sacrificed to the god of “Per my previous email.”
Funny until it isn’t
This is funny until it isn’t.
This was only an outage, and a mostly polite one. Nobody was hacked – or so Microsoft claims – nobody was held to ransom, yet look at us. We are a species that survived ice ages, plagues and the Springboks’ 1980s wilderness years, now brought to our knees by an inbox. Our grandmothers walked past black cats and cracked mirrors on Friday the 13th without a flicker. But we cannot survive a spinning blue circle on our screens.
Consider what happened in France in recent weeks, where cyber criminals reportedly switched off refrigeration in several supermarkets. Hundreds of tons of perishable food had to be thrown away. No bombs, no soldiers. Just a rogue line of code and a lot of very warm yoghurt. If that is what a bored criminal with a keyboard can do to the cheese aisle, one shudders to think what a determined government could do with the whole dairy section. Cybercrime is growing into cyber war, and our fridges may be the front line.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence has arrived in the corporate world like a very keen intern who never sleeps, never complains and never takes leave. We have handed it our spreadsheets, our reports and, increasingly, our thinking. I say this as someone who uses these tools for certain tasks and is grateful for them, but it makes a person wonder who is working for whom.
What happens when tech giants switch off?
This raises the question that kept me up last night, and which I could not even Google properly this morning: what will happen the day when the handful of giant tech companies that now run the world, simply decide to switch off? Not a glitch, not a Friday the 13th outage – but the big, final, lights-out kind.
Picture the scene. Millions of us stumbling out of our homes, blinking in daylight, thumbs twitching for a phone that no longer responds. We would wander the streets in search of Wi-Fi, moaning softly, “Signal… need signal…” Tech-addicted zombies, only with worse posture.
The rest of us, the ones who still own a paper map, a landline and a recipe in our own handwriting, would suddenly be very popular.
Perhaps that is the lesson of this Friday the 13th. We have built our lives on foundations we do not own, cannot see and certainly cannot fix. It might be time to keep a few old-fashioned things around: a notebook, a phone number memorised by heart, and a neighbour you actually know by name.
In the meantime, Outlook is limping back to life. Be careful on Monday. Your inbox has been waiting for you, and it has had a very bad Friday the 13th too.
* Lise Beyers is national news editor of NovaNews.
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