Professor Raj Rajarajan, Director of the Institute for Cyber Security, comments including on how AI adoption could increase the frequency of future outages.
By Dr Shamim Quadir (Senior Communications Officer), Published
Since Thursday 12 November, a massive global Microsoft outage has disrupted services for millions of users worldwide.
While Microsoft reports "sustained improvements" and email queues approaching normal levels as systems slowly recover, many still remain affected by the disruption.
Commenting on the outage, Professor Raj Rajarajan Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at the School of Science & Technology, City St George's, University of London, and co-founder of Cyber London, said:
“This Microsoft outage remains a powerful illustration of the risks of relying on a small number of technology providers and the significant economic consequences of large-scale service disruptions.
“As AI adoption accelerates, we are likely to witness more incidents of this nature. Much of today's digital infrastructure was not originally designed to support the computational demands of large-scale AI services. As enterprises increasingly integrate AI-driven capabilities into their operations, the need for elastic, scalable computing resources will become critical. We are still in the early stages of understanding and forecasting AI demand patterns, and as a result, similar capacity and resilience challenges are likely to emerge over the next 12 to 15 months.
“These challenges will be further compounded by cybersecurity risks. AI systems introduce new and evolving attack surfaces, creating opportunities for threat actors to identify and exploit previously unknown vulnerabilities. As AI capabilities become more deeply embedded within critical services, the potential impact of such attacks will increase significantly.
“To strengthen resilience, we must invest in sovereign hardware and software capabilities while avoiding excessive reliance on any single vendor or technology ecosystem. A diverse, multi-vendor strategy can help reduce systemic risks and improve operational continuity during outages or disruptions.
“Equally important is the development of automated, distributed fail-safe architectures that are resilient by design. Critical services should be capable of seamlessly ‘failing over’ across providers and infrastructures, ensuring continuity of operations even in the event of major vendor outages, cyber incidents, or capacity failures. Building such redundancy and diversity into our digital infrastructure will be essential for maintaining trust, security, and economic stability in the AI era.”
All quotes can be attributed to Professor Raj Rajarajan, Director of the Institute for Cyber Security at City St George's, University of London.
Professor Rajarajan is available to provide further comment on these and other cloud and cybersecurity issues, and also his wider work in helping companies and governments improve their cyber posture.
For enquiries, please contact the City St George’s, University of London press office