Microsoft? More like: My software goes off... Azure AD, Outlook, Office.com, Teams, Authenticator, etc block unlucky folks from logging in

Microsoft's online authentication systems are inaccessible for at least some customers today, locking those subscribers out of tons of Redmond-hosted services if they are not already logged in. And, according to the software giant, its attempt to rectify the system failure, by backing out a recent change, did not work. …

[Bubba Von Braun]

SAFU

And here folks is why mono-cultures are such a bad thing.. From the looks of it this is a global sanfu.

Some companies like my own are now stuck, unable to communicate, because the local powers that be banned alternatives such as slack to appease the M$ gods, and what do you know we are now stuck with sms's and personal contacts in our phones to communicate.

I guess one improvement going to be a relaxing day until this get fixed.

BvB

[MatthewSt]

Re: SAFU

Definitely. We've moved to _the_ cloud, not _a_ cloud. We have an alternative system set up for each of our 365 systems that can't suffer downtime, which in our case is just internal comms. We have a Jitsi room and some Signal groups.

[Mage]

Re: alternative system set up for each of our 365 systems

That's nonsense.

It ultimately depends on MS Office 365.

[MrBanana]

Re: SAFU

First off, I read that as moved_to_a_clown environment. Now thinking I wasn't wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SAFU

"We have an alternative system... that can't suffer downtime"

Those used to be called "LAN"*

*quotes for the youngsters that have never seen one.

[TomPhan]

Re: SAFU

LAN, it's like having your own cloud.

[Paul Hovnanian]

Re: SAFU

Obligatory XKCD.

[NeilPost]

Re: SAFU DoD

Good job the US DoD not on Azure yet.

Locked out of Nukes ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: SAFU DoD

Apologies Donald, but your armed forces are off-line right now, but at least you 'screwed Amazon'. Uncle Vlad is happy though so he'll give you a bit more time to pay off those 'loans'. Job well done, keep it up

[sanmigueelbeer]

This is what we get for putting all our friggin' eggs in one equally friggin' basket.

[ovation1357]

Re: How to reach a trade agreement with 27-country union defined by legal documents

Totally. Who'd have thought that our great-great grandparents (and older generations) all had very sound advice about our 'cloud strategy' even before the cloud or even computers ever existed.

[aaaa]

if only the internet was a distributed network

If only we had designed the internet to be distributed, and not centralised. Oh, the power of 20/20 hindsight. Imagine if we had designed the internet so we could even each have our own mail servers, and apps installed on our desktops, and our own file servers that didn't have to rely on a central server maintained in one place by one organisation. But we know blackberry were right when they designed all international email to go via Canada, and we know that we're happy with the Google/MS duopoly. Don't we?

[T. F. M. Reader]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

And in addition, if only we had thought of a staging procedure to deploy changes to a set of environments smaller than the whole planet, and to reliably roll back or restore if the deployed changes break anything.

[David Lewis 2]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

Next you'll be suggesting they test their updates before pushing them out!

[Potemkine!]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

May the one who never fucked up a deployment throw the first stone at them....

[Strahd Ivarius]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

They test their update in their own lab environment.

Too bad to discover that we are living in that lab and not the real world...

[Mage]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

It's the plot of "No Silver Lining". The world is mostly using half a dozen big service providers. Things like edge routers, DNS and Web Services are similar. Patches are released by separate groups, rushed out on a Friday night. One is for Edge Routers and one set for Web Services.

Mobile Billing, ATMs, POS, electronic payments etc and even some SCADA are outsourced to the Cloud. So no Mobile calls or data, because it can't check your credit. No sales in the shops, no cash dispensing, some power, water and gas systems go down in some countries, no online wholesale ordering.

Lasts a week.

[JetSetJim]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

It's cyclical - it started with mainframes that grew dumb terminals, then power went to the edge with desktops, then the "cloud" grew and power went back to the core. Next stop - edge-cloud services aka "cloud in a box", perhaps run on the high cores per chip devices when the production volumes make it more accessible for the desktop, but you end up renting VMs for the application you want rather than buying and installing it.

Then it'll somehow migrate personal clouds into a whole, central stormfront of clouds.

Lather, rinse, repeat...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: if only the internet was a distributed network

> It's cyclical

Historically yes. But at some point the cycling has eroded the skills and knowledge necessary to take on the duty again when things swing back to the edge.

To say nothing of people who might have had those skills and the knowledge. They'll either be out of the workforce, or slogging away with Bezos' lot or MS or the chocolate factory by then.

[Anonymous Coward]

ADFS

Only seems to be Azure native auth. We use ADFS for all services and have not been affected. All of our clients using ADFS are also OK. All of our clients using Azure auth are offline.

[DougMac]

Re: ADFS

We had problems with Microsoft's systems reaching our ADFS server.

Seems to have been hit or miss per account.

[aregross]

It's a meatbag issue guaranteed.

[Dr. Ellen]

Home is where the data is.

I continue to feel smug over keeping all my programs and data right on this here computer. When my data goes pflui, it'll be something I did, not something some idiot in a computer center did.

[JetSetJim]

Re: Home is where the data is.

Or because MTBF (RAID / backups notwithstanding) :)

[Jim Willsher]

I was in the middle of reconfiguring my home LAN and thought it must be something I had screwed up. I wasted a good hour before giving up and going to bed. Sigh.....

[Kevin Johnston]

That's lucky

Imagine the chaos if this was instead a company that delivered updates to your computer at all hours of the day and night and forced a reboot after each one

[dwyermic]

CLOUD

Have a read of Robert Harris's book "The Second Sleep". It's set in a period where all human information and knowledge has been lost because of something that went wrong with "the cloud".

Cloud = Complete Loss of User Data.

[TimMaher]

Re: CLOUD

I had to double take that.... “The Second Sheep” was what I read.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

No Teams = pitchforks and torches

Local school district board was set to have another virtual meeting to address parent "concerns" (whining) that their kids, the district's students, aren't going to school in-person yet. (This after a similar meeting just a week or two ago followed by in-person protests.)

Apparently someone waited too long to log into the computer handling the meeting via Teams and got bit by this outage.

The already inflamed parents raged even harder. Why couldn't the school board switch to Zoom, or Facebook Live, or any manner of tech they had all summer to study and reject for various reasons?

(Actually, a good reason, against Zoom at least: the limited number of participants means some people just couldn't attend, and meeting transparency laws say that's a no-no; all must be welcome, and the school board can't play favorites who gets the link and who doesn't. Teams apparently doesn't have a limit.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: No Teams = pitchforks and torches

Teams definitely has a limit. I was unable to attend a work meeting because the virtual meeting was 'full'.

Actually Teams has lots of limits. It's shit.

[Potemkine!]

Office 364? Office 363?

Or less?

[Anonymous Coward]

On a postive note

On a positive note: if everyone is on Office 365 and it breaks down for a day, no-one can communicate for a day.

But if I'm on Offie 365 and you're on Google Apps (or on-prem, or whatever) and each breaks down for a day *but on different days* then that's *two* days we can't communicate with each other, which is twice the outage... right?? ;-)

[nichomach]

Teams still appears...

...to be having issues. Mutliple users being unable to sign in.

[DJV]

Re: Mutliple users being unable to sign in

Mutliple users being unable to sign in, end up getting on with doing more productive work (provided they aren't using O3652, of course).

[fidodogbreath]

Redundancy isn't always good

Sadly, our company opted for Webex Teams instead of Microsoft Teams, so IM and meetings still worked. Other than that, yesterday was one of my most enjoyable work days in quite some time.

[sanmigueelbeer]

Microsoft Outlook is down worldwide (01 October 2020)

Microsoft Outlook is down worldwide

Three's a charm?

[EnviableOne]

Please stop refering to CLOUD

Please use the far more descriptive Accronym Other Peoples Tin (OPT)

unless they sort out a trully distributed system, it will always be this way, you are outsourcing the tin component to $PreferedVendor

you still have all the responsibility for the data and services within and have limited your control.