These outages sometimes have a direct effect on consumers' wallets. In June 2018, a failure of Visa payment services blocked 5.2 million transactions in Europe because of a rare computer incident.
A worldwide outage of Microsoft's messaging service this morning is denying tens of thousands of users access. In all, 74 countries, including France, are affected.
The operations of many companies are disrupted around the world. The incident recalls several outages in recent years, as organizations increasingly rely on the tools of the GAFAM.
The scale of the repercussions is explained by this dependence. Companies and institutions concentrate messaging, office software, payments and online services with a small number of American players.
In 2024, Microsoft users had already suffered a major computer outage. An update to security software from the American company CrowdStrike shut down millions of computers and disrupted many sectors.
On July 19, 2024, 6,855 flights were canceled, or about 6.2% of those scheduled that day, according to Cirium, a company specializing in aviation data analysis.
Google's services, too, stopped responding. In the summer of 2020, dozens of the services most used by businesses were disrupted for several hours.
It then became very difficult for workers around the world to send emails, record video conferences or create files on the online service Drive.
In 2021, Facebook was again hit by a major outage, which even became the subject of a Wikipedia page. This outage was the longest in the history of the social network, founded in 2006, according to The New York Times.
During a short-lived outage, global internet traffic collapsed by 40%, the web analytics company GoSquared said at the time. The figure gives a measure of usage concentrated on a few platforms.
This American dependence is also very pronounced within the French state. Civil servants make extensive use of Microsoft's office suite, according to a report by the Cour des comptes.
From messaging to payments, from flights to social networks, each incident points to the same conclusion: when a tech giant stops, a share of work, commerce and public services stops with it.