Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

An identity provider outage is the one failure mode where your dashboards stay green and your entire company stops working anyway. On August 31, 2026, Microsoft acknowledged a widespread Exchange Online incident at 5:30 PM UTC, tracked as EX1464935, and described it in the admin center as "a common failure pattern across affected Exchange Online requests that is associated with authentication and protocol connectivity." Tens of thousands of users were affected according to Downdetector.

An incident response game day is the cheapest reliability investment most engineering teams still refuse to make. The 2026 Catchpoint SRE Report, based on 418 responses from reliability professionals worldwide, names it as one of five defining trends: resilience has to be practiced. Teams that deliberately test failure report more confidence and better preparedness. And yet the same report finds production chaos engineering is still far from standard practice.

It’s Friday afternoon. Two employees have requested time off. Someone calls in sick. Another wants to swap shifts. Then you realize the only certified technician scheduled for the night shift is also marked as being on vacation. What looked like a perfectly organized spreadsheet this morning can quickly turn into a puzzle. As organizations grow, scheduling gets more complex.

Earlier this year, I had the chance to meet with one of our airline customers. During the meeting, we discussed how to use agentic technology to automate L1 workflows. As one of the largest global airlines, they have many applications and service teams focused on flight-critical, tier 1 environments. Any downtime can cause costly delays and unhappy customers.