Techopocalypse! Friday the 13th serves up outages, spy drama and corporate chaos for the world

The tech world is experiencing a Friday it would rather forget. Microsoft is battling a global outage that has disrupted Outlook, Teams and Copilot, affecting businesses and government offices across dozens of countries.

Meanwhile, Nvidia, poster child of the artificial intelligence revolution, is grappling with a leadership crisis after its longtime chief executive Jensen Huang resigned following revelations about his extra-marital relationships, including one involving a woman suspected by US authorities of spying for China.

Also read: The Microsoft trap: One outage can bring the business world tumbling down


One crisis concerns the reliability of the infrastructure powering modern businesses; the other raises questions about corporate leadership, national security and the future of the AI ecosystem.

Could Friday the 13th be serving the technology industry another reminder of its vulnerabilities?

The coincidence is difficult to ignore.

This date has previously coincided with computer viruses and major cloud-service disruptions, stretching back decades.

Microsoft outage disrupts global ops as Nvidia faces leadership turmoil

Microsoft's latest outage has exposed how heavily businesses and institutions depend on its cloud-based services. The disruption affected Outlook, Teams and Copilot, with users across 74 countries and territories reporting problems within an hour.

The company's Microsoft 365 services were affected across the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa. New Zealand's Foreign Ministry said its ability to receive emails had been disrupted, including at its embassies, consulates and representative offices worldwide.

Microsoft attributed the problem to elevated infrastructure load caused by an unexpectedly large number of unavailable servers, rather than an increase in user traffic. Its initial attempts to restore services did not go as planned.

"We've monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed they're not taking as expected," Microsoft said on X, adding that it was exploring alternative measures to increase capacity.

The disruption also spilled into the artificial intelligence ecosystem. OpenAI reported problems with its Microsoft connectors, while Anthropic identified an issue with an upstream provider affecting its Microsoft 365 connector.

The business impact was tangible.

Electric truck manufacturer Workhorse Group postponed its third-quarter results announcement from November 12 to November 16, citing disruptions caused by the outage, Reuters reported.

IndiGo also said its email support services were affected, although its other customer-support channels remained available. Air India, meanwhile, said its flight operations and communication channels were unaffected.

While Microsoft dealt with an infrastructure breakdown, Nvidia was facing a crisis at the top.

Huang, 63, resigned as Nvidia's chief executive on Thursday, November 12, after a series of reports about his alleged extramarital relationships. The controversy intensified after reports linked one of the women, Alice Huang, a former executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed, to suspected Chinese intelligence activity.

US authorities are investigating Megaspeed over allegations that it circumvented American export restrictions to route advanced Nvidia chips to Chinese users. The company has denied wrongdoing, while Beijing has dismissed the espionage allegations as unsubstantiated.

The US Department of Justice has taken over the Commerce Department's investigation into possible export-control violations. Nvidia's board had also launched an independent investigation but previously said it had "no reason to believe" that US national security or company secrets had been compromised.

The controversy has attracted congressional attention, with American lawmakers seeking answers about Huang's relationship with Alice Huang and Nvidia's dealings involving advanced chips destined for China.

A separate report by The New York Times brought another alleged relationship involving Nvidia vice-president Kimberly Powell into focus. Reuters subsequently reported that Huang had an intimate relationship with a second employee, taking the number of reported relationships to three.

The leadership change has added to investor concerns. Nvidia has appointed chief financial officer Colette Kress as interim CEO and named longtime board member Harvey C. Jones its first-ever chairman, while beginning its search for a permanent successor.

The timing is particularly significant because Nvidia's influence extends well beyond chip manufacturing. Under Huang, the company built an extensive ecosystem involving AI developers, data-centre operators and cloud-computing companies.

A Bloomberg report on Friday added another complication, saying Nvidia had faced pressure from customers and Wall Street partners to increase its financing support for AI infrastructure deals. Its proposed partnership with six major asset managers, aimed at financing up to $500 billion in AI computing deals, had failed to produce agreements after months of discussions.

Huang's departure could complicate those efforts, raising questions about whether the company can sustain the financial arrangements that helped fuel the AI boom without its longtime chief at the helm.

Also read: The man in the leather jacket is gone, but new risk haunts AI firms

Friday the 13th: A history of digital disasters

The technology industry's latest troubles have an unusual historical parallel. On January 13, 1989, hundreds of personal computers across Britain were infected by a virus that disrupted software programmes and affected businesses.

A January 14, 1989 report in The Washington Post, titled 'Friday the 13th is unlucky for British computer users', described how the virus spread through IBM personal computers and compatible machines, disrupting programmes and garbling data.

The Jerusalem virus, identified in the report as the '1,813' variety, was named after the number of unwanted bytes it added to infected software. It apparently targeted Microsoft's MS-DOS, the operating system used by the original IBM PCs and compatible machines.

Alan Solomon, a British computer specialist who ran the IBM Personal Computer User Group near London, described the virus as relatively harmless.

"It's very minor, just a nuisance or a practical joke," Solomon told the newspaper.

Nevertheless, his organisation received calls from businesses seeking advice on combating the infection. The report also cited an incident in Israel in which the original virus had reportedly destroyed $15,000 worth of software and two disks containing 7,000 hours of work.

The date would feature in two more significant cloud-computing disruptions. Microsoft's Azure platform suffered a network-related outage lasting almost 24 hours on Friday, March 13, 2009. Amazon Web Services (AWS) also experienced a significant outage on Friday, September 13, 2013.

There is, of course, no technical explanation linking Friday the 13th to these incidents. But the recurring coincidence makes for an intriguing chapter in technology's history.

From a virus affecting individual computers in 1989 to cloud-service failures disrupting organisations across continents today, the scale of technology's reach has changed dramatically.

Microsoft's latest outage has demonstrated how dependent global operations have become on interconnected digital infrastructure. Nvidia's leadership crisis, meanwhile, has exposed the risks that can accompany the concentration of influence around a single corporate figure.

For an industry promising to build an increasingly connected and intelligent future, Friday the 13th has delivered an uncomfortable reminder: even its biggest players are not immune to disruption.