“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough joked Friday that Microsoft’s global outage would give show producers an “excuse” to pull the plug on the show going forward, days after the show was controversially pulled from the air following the assassination attempt on President Donald Trump.
In breaking news, Scarborough said the massive Microsoft Cloud IT outage will give “Morning Joe” producer and director TJ Aspria an excuse to make divisive on-air decisions in the future.
“TJ had an excuse. He said, ‘It was my fault,'” Scarborough said with a laugh. “Three months later. [he’s] “Microsoft outage.” Right. Microsoft. [is] I’m still out.”
Earlier this week, the hosts of “Morning Joe” were thrust into the spotlight after MSNBC pulled the morning talk show from the air on Monday in the wake of the assassination attempt on President Trump.
NBC executives decided to pull the plug on the show after fearing that one of its anti-Trump commentators might make inappropriate remarks. According to a CNN report.
An NBCUniversal spokesperson denied CNN’s report at the time.
“Given the severity and complexity of this incident, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC are continuing to broadcast breaking news coverage from Saturday night,” a spokesperson told The Post on Monday.
The next day, an angry Scarborough said on his show on Tuesday that he was “shocked” and “very disappointed” and slammed his network.
“It was communicated very clearly yesterday that all NBC News channels will have a single news feed on Sunday evening,” Scarborough said at the start of his key 7 a.m. segment.
“That didn’t happen,” Scarborough noted. “Our team didn’t have a clear answer as to why that didn’t happen, but it didn’t happen.”
Scarborough then adamantly told viewers that it would never happen again. “We’re in charge of the news feed, or we’d give the show to someone else to host,” Scarborough said.
Meanwhile, on Friday, Scarborough slammed Microsoft’s technology “monopoly” for the global tech outage.
“This is what happens with a company like Microsoft, which many people consider a monopoly,” Scarborough said. “If something goes wrong with their software, it affects just about everyone, and it seems to grind to a halt as far as commerce is concerned.”
Nearly drowned out by Scarborough’s tirade, co-host Mika Brzezinski tried to move on by correcting Scarborough’s remarks: “Crowdstrike. Got it.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz spoke of a major technology outage on Friday after the company deployed a faulty software update to its computers overnight, resulting in flights being grounded, banks going offline and media being cut off from broadcasting around the world.
“This was not a cyberattack, this was related to a content update,” Kurtz said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today” show. “An update was sent to the system, and that update had a software bug that caused issues with the Microsoft operating system.”
Health systems and some news outlets will be taken offline. @worldofdata001/X
Kurtz was unable to give a timeline for when all systems would be back up and running again.
The skirmish was the latest high-profile on-air rebellion by MSNBC personalities in recent months and exposed turmoil at the network’s top brass.
Several hosts, including Scarborough and former “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd, objected to NBC News’ hiring of former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel as a contributor on-air in March, a decision the network later reversed.
