Christie's website experienced a temporary outage on Wednesday, October 29, due to a global Microsoft 365 and Azure cloud platform disruption. Visitors saw an error message apologizing for the inconvenience and providing contact numbers for Christie's branches in London, New York, Paris, and Hong Kong. A Christie's spokesperson confirmed the outage was caused by the Microsoft issue, and the site was restored after Microsoft pushed a recovery configuration. No live auctions were scheduled that day.
The incident highlights the vulnerability of major art-market institutions to broader tech infrastructure failures. While brief, the outage disrupted access to Christie's digital platforms, which are essential for online bidding, catalog viewing, and client communications. It underscores how dependent the art world has become on third-party cloud services, and the potential for cascading disruptions when those services fail.