Crowdstrike crashed 8 million+ machines and broke many so bad they didn't fix on restart. Their stock is up 3x since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou... . I don't understand it but I also wouldn't bet on anything changing from this outage.
Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical.
So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much.
However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future
It must be 15–20 years now that Mimecast has been offering a protective layer around email services like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. Even today, you can see companies that are still able to keep their email running during Microsoft outages because they have Mimecast's email continuity service in place. It shows the value of having that extra layer of resilience.
If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc.
However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.
A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.
Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.
Yeah true. Only by heel dragging and refusing to roll it into our production stuff lead to us surviving that.