Redmond's on fire, your 365 is terrified: Microsoft email outage en masse Some unknowable terror has struck at the heart of the 21st century's communications infrastructure, as complaints mount regarding the global unavailability of Microsoft services, including email and authentication. Has the cyberwar with the aliens begun? We're not sure. All we know at this early stage of the terrible and …
Because it's still working.
How do I know? Well some nice chap from Nigeria is asking me to help him with his dead uncle's fortune, and I've a client moaning about the price I've quoted for a massive change in the system.
So, actually Microsoft, if you could make 365 go down properly for a few hours - like a full day - that'd be great.
The O365 "security" checker is some sort of javascript thingie as far as I can tell.
I haven't got to the bottom of it yet but disabling on access scanning does allow the authentication (for me) to happen and then you turn it back on again. Otherwise I get the account not found message.
Any time someone tells me that they want to put some software "online" because it's "better", and that software has a local, offline, equivalent, I tell them to go fuck themselves and find an alternative that isn't so idiotic.
Because if I can't access tools that I use every day, I want it to be MY fault and something I can fix, not the fault of any of dozens of possible culprits who will all shout that it wasn't their fault while my business can't do any work.
"I tell them to go fuck themselves and find an alternative that isn't so idiotic" So I am guessing you're an admin - because that approach will preclude you from being responsible for more than system availability. Or you run a very small company and ... yeah, probably not
The fact is, this outage is for the free email service, not 365, so this issue is not related to enterprise.
Another fact is, after 4 years running 365, the only outage I have experienced was ultimately a network failure.
One last point: according to BetaNews, there are 24.9 million users of 365 and Google have 3 million G Suite users, so are all of them wrong?
"so are all of them wrong?"
Quantity doesn't mean they're right. Anyone who complains that an online service is down (in this case I presume it means they can't read archived emails) means they're using the wrong tool and should have been using an "offline" email reader in the first place. So every single one of those people who complained is wrong, yes. Those who didn't complain (or didn't notice) were probably using the right tool for what THEY need. In which case no, those people were not wrong.
Email, however, is a special case since it is by definition "online" - as in you can't GET email if you're not "online" (pedantic exceptions left as an exercise to the pedants...). So sending/receiving emails wasn't covered by my statement, as I note in the disclaimer "and that software has a local, offline, equivalent,". Trying to read previously received emails? I stand by my statement. I don't care if the service is "free" - there's ALWAYS a cost involved.
Had a discussion with a company about the wisdom of using O365. They very angrily told me that it was the better choice, would save money, provide more up time etc. etc. Then they showed me the door.
Just had a panicked phone call from one of their managers, asking if I can help them out, as they have been without email for several hours, and they don't know what to do. I politely suggested that it ain't my problem!
Schadenfreude; gives me a warm tingly glow!
Had a discussion with a company about the wisdom of using O365. They very angrily told me that it was the better choice, would save money, provide more up time etc. etc. Then they showed me the door.
If your company is in the EU it may be worth knowing that (as far as I can tell from some test messages) the Office365 things appears not to be entirely EU privacy compliant. In other words, you may want to point them at the incoming fines under GDPR: the fine for failure ought to comfortably remove any savings they made..
Following the secretiveness of their OS and patches, I note that the article update states MS has "resolved" the issue without stating what the problem was or how it was fixed, unlike others (AWS, etc.). It must be the new openness concept... you get info on a need to know basis and only if all forms are filled out in triplicate and vetted by 14 other people to be named.
I note that the article update states MS has "resolved" the issue without stating what the problem was or how it was fixed, unlike others (AWS, etc.).
That would mean they admit guilt, and this certainly was something as silly as an expired cert or something, you know, the yearly outage ... although I am surprised, the certs problems were previously always in January, if memory serves me right ... mind, maybe with the many repeated week-long downtimes of the past the certs reached March as expiry date....
Anyway, it is certainly something no IT grad would admit to have failed, that is why they keep quiet ... they are Microsoft for a reason™.
M$ reliably locks me out of IMAP/SMTP about 30 days after I reset the password. Still works through the cloud, so I'm pretty sure it is their stupidity, not mine. Best guess is they think anyone using public VPNs are terrorists or even worse, spammers.
After this stupidity recurred a few times, I did the sensible thing and forwarded my incoming mail to an actually reliable email provider. Not sure why my employer is paying for this sorry PoS.
As an aside, five nines is supposed to be a reasonable uptime target; at least M$ limited their goals to the two nines they were likely to achieve.
...by greatly increasing complexity. Every little bit of complexity is something that can break. Of course you can use redundancy to increase reliability, however if that means adding much more code, the net result can be a far less reliable system.
Redundancy only works when you only add little extra code to achieve it. A prime example is RAID 1. It's rather simple to implement, and allows you to survive disk breakdown without any noticeable disruption.
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