Microsoft outage pool chlorine monitoring hotel Germany, Digi Mart USA News (Germany): Several people were injured after excessive chlorine was pumped into the pool at a hotel in Germany, according to the local TV channel WDR. The report attributes the incident to a malfunction in the dosing system, which is monitored via email.
According to WDR, the sauna area’s maintenance safety system tried to send an email warning that chlorine levels were too high. The message never arrived because Microsoft was experiencing major problems with its Exchange cloud infrastructure at the time, an outage that affected numerous services across hotels, airlines and rail operations.
The incident occurred on Friday afternoon, according to a Facebook post by the responding fire department. A total of 40 first responders were dispatched.
The fire department said 15 people required triage following a chlorine gas leak, and WDR reported respiratory irritation among them. Four were taken to the hospital, though only one had to remain under observation because of an injury.
Microsoft has since resolved the outage. Its status page no longer lists any problems and points to earlier updates posted on Twitter/X, in which the company said the fix was completed on the morning of November 14, European time.
The outage highlighted how dependent parts of everyday life have become on Microsoft’s infrastructure.
The incident also raises questions about why a critical monitoring function relies on email, a medium that can be disrupted when cloud services fail.
