Føroya Tele will close Olivant as Outlook outage hits 74 countries

Føroya Tele plans to shut down its email service Olivant on April 1, despite an outage that left Microsoft Outlook unavailable for much of a day, KVF reported.

Kristian Reinert Davidsen, chief executive of Føroya Tele, said the company had decided Olivant would not be part of its future operations because security requirements are expected to grow significantly. He said running an email system requires specialist expertise and is not part of the company’s core business, which is to provide services such as phone and internet connections.

Outlook experienced problems from Thursday evening into Friday. The BBC reported disruptions in at least 74 countries, and KVF was among those affected. Føroya Tele also uses Outlook, Davidsen said.

Olivant was working on Friday, but Davidsen cautioned that this did not mean it was more secure or reliable than Outlook. Any system can be affected by an outage, he said.

Davidsen also warned that hosting a system in the Faroe Islands does not guarantee that it will remain available. He said people should avoid a false sense of security when considering digital resilience.