“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough joked Friday that the global Microsoft outage will give the show’s producer “an excuse” to black out the show’s broadcasts in the future — days after it was taken off the air in a controversial move following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump.
During a breaking news segment, Scarborough said the massive Microsoft Cloud IT outage would give “Morning Joe” producer and director TJ Asprea cover for any divisive broadcasting decisions in the future.
“TJ has an excuse now. He’s like, ‘My bad,’” Scarborough said, laughing. “Three months. Three months from now, it’s [he’s] gonna go ‘Microsoft Outage.’ Okay. Microsoft [is] outing still.”
Earlier this week, the “Morning Joe” hosts were in the spotlight after MSNBC pulled its morning talk show off the air Monday following the assassination attempt on Trump.
NBC brass decided to pull the show over fears that one of its anti-Trump talking heads would make an inappropriate comment, according to a CNN report.
An NBCUniversal spokesperson denied the CNN report at the time.
“Given the gravity and complexity of this unfolding story, NBC News, NBC News NOW and MSNBC have remained in rolling breaking news coverage since Saturday evening,” the rep told The Post on Monday.
The following day, an angry Scarborough threw his network under the bus, saying on his show Tuesday that he was both “surprised” and “very disappointed.”
“We were told in no uncertain terms on Sunday evening that there was going to be one news feed across all NBC News channels yesterday,” Scarborough said as he opened the key 7 a.m. segment.
“That did not happen,” Scarborough noted. “Our team was not given a good answer as to why that didn’t happen — but it didn’t happen.”
Scarborough then defiantly told viewers it would never happen again. “The newsfeed will be us or they can get somebody else to host the show,” Scarborough said.
Meanwhile on Friday, Scarborough went on a rant blaming Microsoft’s “monopoly” on technology for worldwide tech outages.
“This is what happens when you have companies like Microsoft that many people consider to be a monopoly,” Scarborough said. “If something goes down with Microsoft software, just about everybody is impacted and just about everything as far as commerce goes seems to be shut down.”
His co-host Mika Brzezinski, who was somewhat drowned out by Scarborough’s rant, corrected him and was keen to move on: “It’s CrowdStrike — OK.”
CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz addressed the major tech outages on Friday after his company deployed a faulty software update to computers overnight that ended up grounding flights, knocking banks offline and media outlets off the air across the globe.
“It wasn’t a cyberattack, it was related to this content update,” Kurtz said in an appearance on NBC’s “Today.” “The system was sent an update, and that update had a software bug in it and caused an issue with the Microsoft operating system.”
health care systems and some news operations 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 notable on-air rebellion by MSNBC personalities in the last few months, revealing chaos in the upper ranks of NBC.
Several hosts, including Scarborough and former “Meet the Press” moderator Chuck Todd, objected on air in March to NBC News hiring ex-RNC head Ronna McDaniel as a contributor, a decision the network later rescinded.
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