At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the patent firms in the most difficulty were those without established electronic files enabling people to work remotely (yes, those firms still existed in 2020). Today's Outlook outage shows that the IP profession now has the opposite problem, namely an almost complete reliance on electronic systems that may just decide to stop working. The EPO has indicated that " the Rule 134 on Extension of periods applies " to today's Microsoft 365 outage. However, there no details on what this may mean in practice, or how long an extension would be considered (if any, given that services are resuming). The Great Outlook Apocalypse of 2026 may very well be a wake-up call for firms becoming increasingly reliant on one software provider, the only answer to which is to build more redundancy into the system. No tea break for patent attorneys The Microsoft services outage began on Thursday afternoon US time and quickly spread worldwide. Many Mic...