My msn email accounts don't work on my windows machines, either in client program or web mail, but they do work in my android tablet. Go figure. If you're having email trouble and have a tablet, try that.
Microsoft cloud TITSUP: Skype, Outlook, Xbox, OneDrive, Hotmail down
Microsoft cloud services have dived offline, taking down Outlook, Hotmail, OneDrive, Skype, and Xbox Live. The problems appear to have started on Tuesday morning Pacific Time, although systems could have started to wobble earlier: basically, people were and still are unable to log into their Microsoft-hosted services. Outlook …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 19:18 GMT Chris G
A little ray of sunshine
I have just gotten back into my hotmail account here in Spain on my w7 laptop, the odd thing is my account was still open and functioning on my android phone, since outlook/hotmail went cloudy the service has turned to a steaming heap of dung.
It is slow, over complicated to sign in and the UI has degraded even further, the last time being when hotmail was dumped in favour of the outlook flavour. I keep it going because it is easier than trying to migrate all of my contacts to something else, maybe I should rethink.
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 19:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A little ray of sunshine
"went cloudy"
What do you mean "went cloudy," Sunshine? Hotmail was a giant "cloud service" back in the 1990s, they just didn't think to call it that then. Is O365 a crappy service trying to capture what's left of the Exchange/Outlook market before they figure out that you can do email and scheduling with any app, not just "The Precious?" Of COURSE IT IS! Is Hotmail a garbage dump of an online webmail app that makes people wonder why MS is still propping it up and making it part of their Authentication services under the outlook.com property then shoehorning it into whatever runs the O365 suite? Sure, we all do! Did Hotmail have any outages BEFORE all that happened? You bet. So, what exactly is your problem again? :P
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 19:26 GMT PhilBuk
A Bit Up and Down
Got a quote from an insurer via the hotmail account on my phone. Went to a PC to look at it full size and Outlook 2013 prompted me to login - failed. Went to webmail tried to log in, got a page saying that the page I wa trying to view was not TLS 1.1, 1.2 or 1.3 compatible - Microsoft's own page! Went back to phone to forward email to a non hotmail address and, now, couldn't connect to hotmail.
Long live the cloud!, and so on.
Phil.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 09:26 GMT Zippy's Sausage Factory
Re: Ouchie
Then you'll remind them of the revenue cost after it has all died down and they'll be happy again. I for one am grateful that I don't have to mess about supporting exchange server, as I think many people are.
Doesn't work when it means you've just lost a £100K (or more) deal. In that case it's usually "who suggested we start using this rubbish - I want them fired and a proper system installed to replace this malarkey, AND I WANT IT TODAY"
(Paris Hilton because that's as good an analogy for an IT manager as I can think of...)
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 23:19 GMT lorisarvendu
Re: Ouchie
"Good luck explaining that "stuff breaks. When cloudy stuff breaks, lots of stuff breaks" to angry wrathful execs if you just persuaded your org to migrate..."
Ah but we in IT get angry wrathful execs almost every week when something somewhere breaks. Regardless of whether we have control over it or not (or whether we caused it or not!), each time that we fix it (or it fixes itself), the execs calm down, agree with us that "stuff happens" and go away, telling us we're the best IT Department ever...until the next time. Repeat ad nauseam.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 09:26 GMT Phil W
Re: Ouchie
"if you just persuaded your org to migrate"
If you did the persuading in a company large enough to have multiple people who could be titled "exec" then you deserve to be taken outside and shot anyway. Either you're in IT and have no idea what you're talking about, or you're not in IT and shouldn't be trying to persuade the execs to make major IT changes anyway.
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 22:19 GMT Hans 1
Re: Sorry, my fault...
Despite my objections, we migrated to Office365 from on-prem Exchange last week.
It's obvious that Microsoft's infrastructure just can't cope now, we broke it...
Sorry...
You have to admit, Office 332 is cheap, really cheap ... at some point, when you wanna scale, you need enterprise OS' (so no Windows), then, you need more than under-grads with a Minesweeper MCP .... MS only have to survive until the competition is chapter 11, then they can raise prices 100 fold ... and the IDIOTS are migrating in droves, we migrated months ago ... I told them, The World Won't Listen! At least we keep on premise Exchange, you know, in case; AS THE MS SALES GUY TOLD US ... no downtime for us ... you poor sods!
What is the bloody point of migrating to Office 332 when we have to keep Exchange in-house in case MS f*cks up ??????????
As Mr Smith £ family would put it, The World Won't Listen!
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 21:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
A familiar pattern
Nothing new here to anyone who has observed the corporate IT scene for a few decades.
IBM took fright at the threat from Apple (which was never any kind of threat to it) and created Microsoft, the most dangerous rival it has ever had.
DEC, facing serious difficulties, chose to continue as a hardware company while more or less killing its software business - presumably because, as software manager David Stone told the board, software made profits and hardware made none.
And now we see Microsoft looking around for new worlds to conquer, and choosing the cloud. "Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first send mad".
Although right now it seems as if it's the customers who are really mad. At Microsoft.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 04:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A familiar pattern
And, such are the tribulations and shortcomings of conglomerates like M$ in general, and oligopolies of them in particular. That is, they have no particular allegiance to, or need to improve, any one of their varied unrelated products or services, aiming instead for the survival and profit of the overall financial operation, and when they fail as in this case, they take down multiple services, or products, at once, products and services that had no economic justification for being in the same house, or cloud, to begin with.
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 22:25 GMT Roger B
At least for me it lead to a slightly more productive evening, no email, no OneDrive and no Xbox.
Here's one for the conspiracy theorists though, my Windows 10 laptop, admittedly its ancient, but it has been on this evening and felt more sluggish than usual, I'd not bothered switching anything else on to check, but how much of Windows 10 is reliant on cloud services?
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Tuesday 21st March 2017 22:51 GMT Almost Me
Probably asking everyone for their parent's permission to log in
All of our Skype accounts suddenly stopped working because apparently (a) we apparently were born in 2015, (some years after the accounts were created), and therefore need our parent's permission to log in, and (b) have Credit cards with US addresses even though we don't live there so we can prove our age...
Makes me glad my company's not using Azure... and now not planning to.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 06:12 GMT Pascal Monett
Outlook, Skype, XBox, OneDrive, Hotmail
Once upon a blissful time, all these were separate products, with separate authentication services etc etc. When one broke down, it didn't hinder any of the others.
Now, tell me again why it was such a good idea to regroup all these totally different products into the same Single Point Of Failure mode ? Economies of Scale, you say ?
Well, you're not economizing on the scale of the failures, now are you ?
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 10:15 GMT MJI
Re: Outlook, Skype, XBox, OneDrive, Hotmail
Is that why I get strange logins for Hotmail now?
I don't have a Skype, nor a One Drive, nor an X Box?
What has an email account to do with online telephones, or a gaming login?
NOTHING
I have had 2 Hotmail accounts for YEARS. They are now approaching unusable, one is my fail over non ISP non my mail server account, and the other my risky use one.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 08:11 GMT Solarflare
I got part of the blame for this
...from the missus, as she couldn't get her email on her phone. She accepted it was probably a microsoft problem when everything else worked fine and we just couldn't connect to login.live.com. You bugger about with your internal network one* time and she blames every future hiccough on you for evermore...
*OK...perhaps it was more than one time, your honour.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 08:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I got part of the blame for this
I don't bugger with the network at all yet, since I'm the expert, it must be my fault. Nope, it's the 16-yo. Last time was locking us adults out of the router, which lasted only as long as it took me to change the MAC address. And, no, the teen couldn't have done it. I'm the expert, he doesn't know this shit.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 09:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Here we go.
We're all just going to have to get used to this. I've been in IT for a while, and I've always strived to build software that works, keeps working or at the very least provides meaningful diagnostics that pass the '3am test' if things do go wrong.
We accepted unreliability from early versions of Windows - after all it was Microsoft, the problems were local and machines could be swiftly be rebooted. Then we all got real operating systems everywhere and things really just started to work. Even Windows.
Now in some ways we've come full circle - the unreliability is back again, but we've got out of the habit of coding around it or providing useful diagnostics. Even worse - the unreliable machines are no longer ours, and can no longer be rebooted quickly to correct problems. And even worse is that the generation of junior developers coming into the industry think that's just how things are, that you can hack anything together given 48 hours and enough Pizza.
Experienced people are being managed out of companies to save money, and so much outsourcing has happened that no-one's truly sure or really cares who's responsible for what any more.
We are going to see some terrible outcomes from all this and we're going to see them soon.
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Wednesday 22nd March 2017 10:34 GMT VulcanV5
There seems to be something wrong with your computer . . .
Wife and I had an outlook.com email address in our names. Like gmail and ymail, it was synched to deliver to us whenever called upon by our desktop client. The way Microsoft had it working was as follows:
Monday morning, outlook emails are delivered. Tuesday afternoon, they're not: no server connection possible. Wednesday lunch, everything OK, Wednesday night, oops, big red X plastered over the outlook account, no server connection possible. Thursday: no server connection all day. Friday: everything working all day. Saturday: working half a day. Sunday: big red X, 'please check your configuration'.
This state of affairs occurred throughout November. December. And January. Microsoft's considered advice was that something seems to be going wrong somewhere on your computer. Told that actually, it isn't our outlook.com address configuration on this computer which changes by the hour but Microsoft's ability to actually deliver anything which changes by the hour. Why might that be, Mr Redmond? Microsoft's response: check your configuration, re-install, re-test, blah blah etc blah. If you require further help, please visit our forum.
We no longer have an outlook.com email address, though still keep a barge-pole to ensure that any contact with any other of Microsoft's superb services is pushed resolutely aside.