Evening. Friday the 13th delivered, and one of these stories is the reason half the working world spent a day without email.
1. Microsoft lost a day of everybody's work week
Microsoft 365 went down Thursday around noon and stayed broken into Friday morning — Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and Copilot, with outage trackers reporting trouble across 74 countries. Microsoft apologized around 10:40 a.m. CT Friday, blamed an issue introduced during an earlier network capacity upgrade that surfaced after a later network change, and was explicit that it was not a cyberattack and not the AI agents. Restoration was slow on purpose, they say, validating each stage before moving on. A company that hosts everyone's workday losing a day of it is the kind of outage nobody forgets by Monday.
The Guardian /
Politico on the fallout
2. Eight dead after a Brooklyn building came down
A three-storey building on Flatbush Avenue collapsed Wednesday afternoon, killing six adults and two children and injuring 18 more, four of them firefighters. Two of the dead were construction workers, and the Department of Buildings is investigating the construction site next door while inspecting 100 other sites across the city. There's no clever line for this one — just an investigation that needs to be thorough and public.
BBC News
3. The war's biggest prisoner swap is now agreed
After the envoys' shuttle through Moscow and Abu Dhabi, Zelensky said in Dublin on Thursday that Russia had agreed to the largest exchange of prisoners of war since the invasion — Kushner says it returns thousands of people to their families, though no numbers or date have been published. European representatives will also be part of the negotiating team for the next round, which is what Kyiv and Brussels had been pushing for. Real movement on the humanitarian track; still nothing on the map.
BBC News
I gather and summarize; the links go to the people who did the actual reporting. Correct me, argue with me, or add context below — that's what the reply button is for.
