For those wanting to be paid for a UK snow day...this might just justify it..."no I'm not in the office, no I can't do any work...the Office is down."
Trying to log into Office 365 right now? It's a coin flip, says Microsoft: Service goes TITSUP as Azure portal wobbles
The day of week ends in "day" so, of course, Microsoft's Office 365 has fallen over, and Azure portal is having a wobble, too. Right now, if you're trying to login afresh into Microsoft 365, there is a 50-50 chance it will work. The outage appears to be worldwide, and Australia and New Zealand may as well give up, according to …
COMMENTS
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Tuesday 29th January 2019 23:51 GMT Somone Unimportant
Yes, we had quite a few people affected by this ourselves.
Took out One Drive, Azure portal (but not our Azure hosted services thank heavens!), Sharepoint online and Outlook, and got services back just over 2 hours into our working day.
OWA appeared OK and thankfully our primary file storage is still on-prem so it wasn't affected.
With 200+ staff, that's 400+ lost hours of productivity, so a conservative $20,000 loss to our business.
So Microsoft - where's our refund cheque?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 06:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: So Microsoft - where's our refund cheque?
Aren't you speaking to your lawyer and preparing a class action suit?
After all, this is not all that rare event with Orifice 340 now is it?
Ok, si I exagerate a bit with the '340' but to call something '365' does give people the idea that it is there 24/7/52 when clearly it is not always available.
{proudly working in a Microsoft free zone for 21 months and counting}
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 00:19 GMT ThatOne
New Register category - "Microsoft Problems"
Who else thinks that Microsoft blunders have gotten so common they deserve their own "The Register" category? It seems to me like there hasn't been a day without something breaking in the last months, be it their cloud or some "upgrade" killing MS Windows...
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 01:01 GMT Claptrap314
Re: New Register category - "Microsoft Problems"
I much prefer the decrementing reference. Office362 it was for a while. Now we're at Office361....
As for the rest of m$ "issues', that's just "how we got to be so rich". Questionable to call it "news", reallly, except for the fact that it so regularly ruins the day of so many people.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 06:37 GMT FuzzyWuzzys
Re: Remind me again why ...
Come on now! It's because PHBs understand it and if they can understand it, then it must be good. So they invite people in from MS who tell them how great the cloud products are and how much money they will save by sacking all their onprem staff, especially those know-it-all ones with 20+ years solid experience of IT. Then it'll be easy to sell it to the upper/board management of the company looking to squeeze every single penny they can from the company.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 07:13 GMT luminous
Re: Remind me again why ...
Because it's cheaper for a small business of 30 people or less to pay Microsoft or Google a couple of hundred bucks a month to run all their email and shared calendars than it is to hire an IT admin full time and pay for dedicated servers and email software akin to the cloud offerings (standard IMAP just isn't the same).
Maybe it goes down a few hours a month but it's not the end of the world for the majority of businesses. Inconvenient and frustrating but not fatal. And the cost difference is substantial.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 10:04 GMT Tezfair
Re: Remind me again why ...
I've looked after on prem servers for donkeys years, and Exchange from 2000 and I don't recall once ever having any outage. Small business don't need a full time IT, I agree, however I look after many small businesses with various versions of Exchange and them paying me is far better than them paying a foreign company and the UK gov losing out on tax.
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Thursday 31st January 2019 15:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remind me again why ...
"cheaper for a small business of 30 people or less to pay Microsoft "
Okay I'll bite; so why do big dumb companies of 1000 (10000?) people or more pay Microsoft?
... other than they're big dumb companies, I mean.
At $WORK, the IT people have always wanted to be a microsoft monoculture, dating back to the 90's craziness, and did their best to ignore or even thwart mac and linux users where they could.
With recent regime changes, someone with executive say-so likely bought-in to o365(-N) as a "solution", possibly so the company could "partner" with microsoft on the product and sales fronts as part of the "bargain".
That conspiracy theory aside, the end result is anyone who isn't bought into microsoft on the desktop as the solution for everything suffers. The mac folks seem to feel the pain the worst, the linux engineers appear to have mostly shrugged and given up.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 09:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remind me again why ...
t's easy to say it's garbage if you don't use it. However Office365 is pretty good and very useful for organisations.
This is coming from someone who isn't into Cloud-hype, AI-hype and is no fan of Microsoft. However when a product is pretty good I'm prepared to say it. It has its frustrations for sure but what software doesn't?
I'll admit that it certainly isn't cheap, the costs are ongoing and it's difficult to extract yourself from it if you get wrapped into it.
If you know of an alternative that is as feature rich and has the same security and ease of use then let us know?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 11:20 GMT Zippy´s Sausage Factory
Re: Remind me again why ...
As good as Office 263* is, there are other alternatives. Such as open source. But management don't like them because you stand or fall by how well you manage things. If you buy Microsoft, you have someone to sue if things go wrong. It's management by passing the buck.
* this was a typo but feels like it'll end up being a prescient prediction by the end of the year...
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 15:51 GMT Alister
Re: Remind me again why ...
Such as open source.
There is still no readily available open source alternative which gives you all the features of email, calendars, collaborative working, active directory and single sign-on that Office 365 does.
Sure, you can, at great expense of time and effort, cobble together disparate bits of open source software to do a similar job.
But the time and effort come at a cost to businesses, and require someone with decent IT skills to get working and keep working. Why would any business bother?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 13:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Remind me again why ...
"Having had to use it: no and no, in that order"
I suspect you haven't really used it then or it wan't properly rolled out. I have not met many people (mostly in a group of sceptics who are no fans of Microsoft) who say it isn't actually any good.
Expensive, lot of individual frustrations, yes but the architecture and solution is fairly sound. It is probably the best product to come out of Microsoft since Windows XP.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 07:08 GMT Ken Moorhouse
Microsoft really need to get their act together...
We all know about Patch Tuesday.
Surely they can nominate one day each week to have their outages, and stick to it? I nominate Friday, in the afternoon, preferably, then they could call it POTS Friday.
Now to get into this regime they can either delay the next one until next week, but that's pushing it a bit. Neither we nor they could survive that long without it, so perhaps we can have another one at the end of this week.
What do you reckon?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 09:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Office 363
...And Counting. It's only January. If you work in financial years it's obviously worse again.
What does it take to persuade the global procurement brigade that there's something better and cheaper already out there? You could point a gun at the heads of those responsible and not get them to budge. No doubt there are back handers everywhere to persuade them to stay.
On the subject of backhanders, why do so many big companies insist on you using their own, outsourced travel ticketing system, even though it is more expensive than booking yourself? Clearly there must also be backhanders and shenanigans going on there too. I can't come up with many other explanations, perhaps, it's some sort of job creation scheme?
The corporate world has driven me quite mad and I think I shall be looking for a small business instead for my next move.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 12:59 GMT DaLo
Re: And this is what you get
Hmm, very different from "if you can't afford for it to go down".
There's also still many ways that a system can go down, other than a single or even multiple server outages.
Also a backup will only restore to the a certain recovery point in a certain recovery time. May be fine for your file server but if you are dealing with real-time high volume databases then restoring from backup might be pointless - if that is your 'solution' to a system you can't afford to go down.
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Monday 4th February 2019 10:20 GMT DaLo
Re: And this is what you get
And there in lies the problem. You get geographical separation, however you need to do synchronous replication to ensure consistence, which has issues if you have a distance with even moderate latency as you have to await the ack from the remote site before processing the next bit of data. So you then use a cached synchroniser which keeps the latency down but must be physically separated from the rest of the network, separate power etc. However you also need local redundancy so you don't have to rely on your separate geographical location. So you can end up with three to four parallel systems (possibly each running RAID 10 ) and you storage requirements get quite large.
You also need a third location to ensure you don't get a split brain scenario. To use your second geo location you also need the infrastructure to be able to run from that location - extra internet connection, switch hardware etc. Then you might also need a physical location to use that connects to it. Don't get started about the live testing that you need to do to make sure it all works (and what if it doesn't during that test - all hell breaks loose)
Or you could just host it in the cloud (which has some of its own risks, for sure) - you can see why it can be an attractive option. Don't need to worry about it and your head isn't on the chopping block if it your expensive "bullet-proof" system stops working.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 10:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Authentication? Me too!
Umm - I broke something yesterday too. Had two domain controllers in one of our sites live-migrate between Hyper-V hosts simultaneously. A one-in-a-million shot. But since we know they come up 9 times out of 10, they both did their off-move-on flicker at exactly the same moment.
Then Hyper-V got pissy because its DC/DNS had disappeared and wouldn't start the DCs in the new locations. And it took 15 minutes for it to finally just go "fuck it - restart them". They were simply missing from all the Hyper-V hosts. I should know - I checked them all, panicking.
Measures have been taken to prevent this in future. Maybe Microsoft live-migrated their DCs at the same time and triggered all the phone calls too...
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 10:44 GMT STOP_FORTH
Fragility of DNS
I know there have been fairly recent attempts to bolster the DNS system against malicious attacks, but is the system still fit for use? I presume most of the recently reported problems are down to misconfiguration or other human error.
Is this one reason why Google is trying to move Android users over to Chrome and their own DNS so that Android users can survive some imminent DNS apocalypse? (I'm sure there are other "good/do no evil" reasons to do this!)
Do I have to start editing my Hosts files to include all of my frequently visited sites the way I used to when I was using a rubbish ISP with an unreliable DNS?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 21:56 GMT SImon Hobson
Re: Fragility of DNS
... why Google is trying to move Android users over to Chrome and their own DNS so that Android users can survive some imminent DNS apocalypse?
Nah, if there is such an impending apocalypse (which I doubt) then it's only incidental if Google's DNSoverHTTPS avoids the issue. One real reason is to make sure that your DNS goes via Google.
The claim is that it avoids people seeing your DNS queries - but of course we all trust Google with our information don't we ?
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 17:17 GMT TheVogon
Re: Century Link
"It looks like it was a Century Link fat finger that caused the issue"
It guessing that Microsoft have a resilient setup across 2 providers. As one failed that's why 50% of requests did. I would have expected them to spot that immediately and also to automatically redirect to the working provider though.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 22:04 GMT SImon Hobson
Re: Century Link
That wouldn't be an excuse.
One of the great claims for "cloud" is the ability to have stuff in different locations etc. MS have enough scale for the loss of "a link" to perhaps cause a slight blip while the system reconfigures - but having an outage like this because of "a link failure" would imply a complete noob approach to networking resilience.
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Wednesday 30th January 2019 20:35 GMT StuntMisanthrope
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Done it every which way in most combinations. You have an outage once every five years on your own gear. It's tough to point the finger at yourself when it costs lots of money. It's not life threatening, there's a seat limit and time-zone hassle for 365/24/7 and I've been know to implement off policies at certain hours for everyone's well-being. 0500AM to 0230AM is a long day. Also global DNS is as big a headache as you ever want. #rimmersthenamehologramsthegame
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Thursday 31st January 2019 06:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Jesus Christ, Microsoft!!
When I saw this article, I thought it must be the same one where I joked in the comments that for 2019 we were at "Office 364, and counting!"
But no, this is ANOTHER story on ANOTHER Office 365 outage, which just happened to be a few days after the OTHER outage covered in the first story.
I will be direct in my response. I hereby encourage MS to "get it's shit together" on it's cloud offering, or just give Office customers their nice on-prem CDs and Exchange Servers back.