back to article Global network outage hits Microsoft: Azure, Teams, Outlook all down

Microsoft is currently rolling back a network change across its wide area network that it believes toppled over a raft of its cloud services this morning, perhaps in solidarity with the company's tumbling profits. Users all over the world are venting their anger on social media at not being able to send or receive email, …

  1. AnotherName
    Trollface

    Advertising Standards

    I think the ASA needs to have a word with them about the number '365' and what it means.

    It's probably a warning to people out there not to put all your baskets into one cloud.

    1. Zippy´s Sausage Factory
      Joke

      Re: Advertising Standards

      They've been secretly continuing the numbering since Windows for Workgroups, it should be Microsoft 3.65

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Advertising Standards

        Don't be immature there is absolutely nothing wrong with Microsoft 365, it's reliable and our staff depend upon it to help facilitate meetings talking about their pets. If it wasn't for M364 I'm sure the bosses would have more of the staff back in the office. The only way we got M363 is due to COVID but at this rate the business case for M360 is looking weaker each year.

        1. Dave559

          Re: Advertising Standards

          Careful now! If the counter ever reaches 360, the shambling zombie corpse of Yahoo 360° will emerge from the depths…

          (No, I had never heard of it either, until I once stumbled across a Wikpedia page about it)

        2. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
          Facepalm

          Reliability and Fallback Plans

          Just because you and your staff "depend" on O365 does not make it "reliable"! More specifically, all cloud-based services depend on Internet connectivity.

          What is your company's fallback plan for when that connectivity -- for whatever reason -- fails?

          1. deebeee1

            Re: Reliability and Fallback Plans

            Well not sure that is the case for express route (private peering for 365 and azure services) and direct connect for AWS. No internet needed when hooking up your VPC/vnet to your WAN.

        3. PeterM42
          Facepalm

          Re: Advertising Standards

          What about 364½, 363½, etc? Outages don't necessarily last ALL day.

          Oh! Wait.........

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Advertising Standards

      Well I guess "365" is ok as it gives them a day of outage spread across 4 years?

      1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

        Re: Advertising Standards

        Isn't it funny, however, how all those outages seem to happen at the start of any such period?

    3. hoola Silver badge

      Re: Advertising Standards

      But is you could still login then the service is considered to be "up".

      The fact that it is totally unusable is irrelevant to desk wallahs that push all the marketing crap about 99.9999999999999% uptime.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    If Microsoft keep using Europe as beta testers for the US I'll be investigating moving our entire company to Apple or Google (three major outages in as many weeks - all hitting Europe at/before 9am and all barely fixed before the US wakes up)

    1. FirstTangoInParis Bronze badge

      Google apps on Mac or even Chromebook would probably be best. Apple office apps aren’t man enough, and Office 365 on Mac has some features missing. 365 on iPad has so many features missing they should call it Office Lite. Macs probably have the longest software support, though there’s some oddities; 2017 MacBook Air gone out of support a year later than a 2012 MacBook Pro.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Not in a month of Sundays. Microsoft is already sniffing around trying to see if it can get a spy global operation up like Google (remember the "we will scan for your Office 365 copies using the next security update " thing?), but it's merely doing what it always does: trying to imitate another company which is already making a mint doing exactly that, and that is Google.

        Here is a hint: read the Terms you have to agree to. Plan for a lot of coffee, and make some time for it, don't try to do it all in one go (they're designed to tire you out before you get to the dodgy bits, which is admittedly standard contract practice but MS, Facebook and Google have elevated that to almost an art form).

        Once you have read them and actually understand what you've agreed to you may never touch Google again, ever.

        Back to MS: the good thing about Microsoft trying to imitate another company's services is that it invariably cocks it up, badly, and that effort then joing a long line of other attempts to broaden their revenue stream.

        They have since long given up being innovative themselves. The only innovation MS has really come up with over the years is the various methods by which they lock in and then fleece their victims customers..

        1. R Soul Silver badge

          then join a long line of other failed attempts to broaden their revenue stream.

          FTFY

    2. JimboSmith

      I was called by a colleague this morning to say that email, teams etc. were down. I pointed out that I was on my day off and actually didn’t care. They said it was Microsoft that had cocked things up to which I said so I can’t do anything about it. Let IT support worry about it, I said that MSFT would doubtless fix it at some point and I was going back to sleep.

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'll be investigating moving our entire company to Apple or Google

      We have some larger client on Google Workspace, and over the years Workspace has been a lot more resilient than MS365 (which our other clients are stuck with).

      At the end of the day, it depends on what your company wants. MS365 has some great looking apps and a lot of features Workspace doesn't have, but the backend behind MS365 seems to be put together with toilet roll cores and chewing gum. So if you're dependent on Microsoft apps then MS365 is the only option as MS is killing all standalone versions that are still existing one by one. However, if the focus on just having a reliable messaging backend then Workspace is a good option, and even the often derided Google apps have long reached maturity for serious work. Plus, the Workspace admin settings aren't all spread across a number of completely different and constantly changing user interfaces (which all are at their own semi-constant rate of disfunction) like MS365 is.

      As far as Apple is concerned, iCloud uses lots of Azure and reliability can be hit and miss (although it's still better than Microsoft's own services). Still, it's essentially a consumer grade service with limited capabilities in a business environment. Even for a very small shop (couple of users) I'd rather invest in Google Workspace than iCloud.

  3. Antony Shepherd

    *looks smugly at LibreOffice icon*

    Well gosh, maybe having everything depend on *the cloud* ain't such a good idea?

    1. AnotherName

      I tend to think of cloud services as a form of ransomware - you have to keep paying to have access to your data, and there's no guarantee that it is any more secure than it would have been when held locally. The only thing it seems to be good for is the profits of the cloud companies. I seem to remember when Bill Gates was in charge, one of his dreams was to have a recurring monthly income stream.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        cloud services are not a good idea ...

        ... when everyone except you can access your data, and you have to pay th' Mill Owner for the privilege.

      2. Potemkine! Silver badge

        When will the day when torches and pitchforks be used against beancounters come, if it will ever?

        1. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
          Joke

          well, they have to approve the PO for torches and pitchforks first...

      3. Youngone

        Tell that to the guys who run the multi-billion dollar empire I work for. Their mantra is now "everything in the cloud" and Microsoft's cloud features pretty heavily.

        Not that I care either way. Not really my problem.

    2. Captain Scarlet
      Flame

      Yes but no good if you can't access anything.

      I couldn't access anything (Windows Laptop and Android handset) thanks to the global corp using Microsoft Authenticator, not mentioned but this wasn't working either.

      Lovely morning, because I couldn't auth with Microsoft MFA, my VPN would connect but refuse to auth further, I couldn't access the internet because the Proxy software used couldn't authenticate me.

      Also as per usual the Microsoft status website showed no issues until after 8AM, couldn't get through to helldesk so I was very confused (Although that is becoming more normal these days).

      Yet again a morning of whinging at yet another single point of failure.

    3. Evil Auditor Silver badge
      Devil

      While in my private life I stay clear of cloud stuff, I cannot not see the vast advantage for businesses to have everything in the cloud. Namely: every business in one, single cloud. When The Cloud's offline, every business is offline so no one is bothered that their counterparts are not responsive.

    4. yakacm

      Yup, it's a stupid idea, for many, many reasons, this just being in the top 3.

    5. Dave Null

      How are you conflating online services being down with a local install of Libre Office?

    6. Merrill

      "A distributed system...

      "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable."

      Leslie Lamport

    7. teknopaul

      Kinda.

      You can't do email and chat voice without a server somewhere.

  4. I Am Spartacus
    Mushroom

    Teams outage

    Productivity is up significantly

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: Teams outage

      Employees are also happier, power consumption has gone down

      1. Evil Auditor Silver badge
        Coat

        Re: Teams outage

        power consumption has gone down

        Teams makes the difference whether I'm cold in the office.

        Icon, 'cause it's been cold.

      2. teknopaul

        Re: Teams outage

        Unfortunately I wasn't affected. Seems only some people got lucky

  5. Pirate Dave Silver badge

    "Critical Business activities are impacted majorly this morning."

    Yeah, that's the white streak of fear that I made damned sure Manglement knew was a possibility when we migrated to Office365 several years ago. That we could come in one day, and Microsoft could have blown itself out of the water during the night, and nothing would work for the entire day. It was felt that the possibility of that was more than offset by us not having to manage (or pay for) an on-prem mail system, so we went full speed ahead. But yeah, Microsoft soiling itself was, and remains, a major menace to the system they're selling.

    "CEO Satya Nadella ascribed this to customers "optimizing" their cloud spend, and predicted that growth would resume once Azure can deliver the AI customers want"

    The only AI I "want" is one that tells the Microsoft techs "If you push out this config change, you will likely break all Office365 operations across all Microsoft domains. Are you Really Sure you want to do this?". Too bad Microsoft hasn't figured out how to do that yet. They certainly have enough failure event data points to train the system with, though.

    1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Time for MS to pay for these outages

      'F' the small print in their 100,000 page contracts.

      Their ineptitude has cost businesses billions over recent weeks. Get that class action ready folks.

      Start with $100B. Companies like MS need to be taught a lesson that while businesses depend on you, if you screw up then you should carry the can.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Time for MS to pay for these outages

        Why do you think they get all the beta testing done before it's 7am EST? The chances of class actions are remote.

      2. Mike 137 Silver badge

        Re: Time for MS to pay for these outages

        "Get that class action ready folks"

        If that happens and they they win, the lawyers will be laughing all the way to the bank and those represented will get five bucks each.

        1. David 132 Silver badge

          Re: Time for MS to pay for these outages

          and those represented will get five bucks each

          ITYM, “a coupon for $3.50 off their next purchase of a Microsoft 365 subscription”. That seems to be the way these things usually go.

  6. wolfetone Silver badge
    Coat

    25 Days in to 2023

    Office 365 is already at Office 364.

    1. AnotherName
      Devil

      Re: 25 Days in to 2023

      I think someone at MS has confused uptime with fuck-up time

  7. chivo243 Silver badge
    FAIL

    The first domino?

    I'm wondering if this will be indicative of other tech companies showing lots of employees the door. Timber!

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: The first domino?

      Lotus Domino would mean having to use Lotus Notes

      <<shudders>> and nukes from orbit (to make sure)

      1. Nursing A Semi

        Re: The first domino?

        Ahh but, I used Notes during a 8 year spell at IBM and do you know how many days it failed to work?

        1. Scott Wichall

          Re: The first domino?

          I would guess at zero days.

        2. nematoad Silver badge

          Re: The first domino?

          "...do you know how many days it failed to work?"

          Yes but that's not the point of many comments regarding Lotus Notes.

          The bloody program might have worked but with all the convoluted ins and outs did you manage to get any work done while struggling to get it to do what you wanted?

        3. Captain Scarlet
          Windows

          Re: The first domino?

          Depends on the setup, I managed 98% uptime at my worst, but then it was a few Windows servers and not the infrastructure I wanted (i.e Lotus Domino made it super simple to replicate everything to a backup server or a server dedicated for webmail. All could be controlled through Notes networks, which no-one I spoke to ever knew wtf it was, often setup for dialup and never updated). Also had to deal with fighting for resources on the SAN, in the end I found using the inbuilt NSF compression lowered I/O requirements and the Blade had more than enough CPU resources that actually made it faster to respond. Never did use the de duplication (I did find in testing that was a problem)

          I really did like Notes 9 when released, but at the time it was bloated and wasn't Outlook and I can't make people like Notes just because I did.

          1. Pirate Dave Silver badge

            Re: The first domino?

            I felt the same pain on the Groupwise side. Doesn't matter how wonderful the server parts are, if the users don't like the client because "it isn't Outlook", you're already on borrowed time.

            1. Captain Scarlet

              Re: The first domino?

              Did Groupwise suffer from misconfigured Exchange servers sending out winmail.dat instead of S/MIME emails?

              1. Pirate Dave Silver badge

                Re: The first domino?

                No. The GWIA process would blow-up sometimes if a From or To address was really weird, but for the most part, it just plodded along.

        4. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The first domino?

          We were working on a new project and the company had Lotus Notes, our company used Microsoft Exchange with all the trimmings.

          And then the ILoveYou virus hit (which gives you some idea how long ago that was, it was even then already rubbish, and this was pre cloud, so on prem).

          Our own company: about a 7 day outage (people working over the weekend included).

          Company with Lotus Notes: not as much as a twitch during the original wave, and one infection about a week later when a secretary came back from holiday.

          The key reason for the difference was because it was way, WAY harder to launch anything executable from Lotus Notes.

          I recall another customer from those days who had two Lotus Notes setups. One they had running on a Windows setup, and the other one on Linux. The Linux guy spent most of his days drinking coffee watching the Windows people trying to keep the thing running - his ran just fine :).

          1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: The first domino?

            We put Blotus Goats in at three letter pharma, I had one user that was overjoyed at the migration.

            Then she got her hands on (Our implimentation) of it & exclaimed WTF have they done with this, it's awful.

            It was around this time (For many reasons) I got my icon.

          2. Captain Scarlet

            Re: The first domino?

            Get the Linux guy to run the Windows version, as apart from filepaths only AIX had any major differences therefore what was he doing?

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: The first domino?

              I think they were running a pilot.

              Given the time this happened I think someone from Microsoft had just been and convinced them to go all Microsoft and some supicious people decided to put that to the test.

              And failed spectacularly, as usual when the rubber meets the road.

        5. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
          Trollface

          Re: The first domino?

          All of the 8 years?

  8. trevorde Silver badge

    Does not make sense

    "Plenty of irate customers are contacting Microsoft via Twitter to share their problems"

    Is Twitter still working?

    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
      Trollface

      Re: Does not make sense

      Is Twitter still working?

      Well they still have servers up, is that enough?

    2. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Does not make sense

      Duck Duck Go was down because Azure was wobbly I assume.

      1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

        Re: Does not make sense

        Doesn't it get its answers from Bing?

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Does not make sense

          Yes, although no idea why you were downvoted for that.

          1. The Oncoming Scorn Silver badge
            Coat

            Re: Does not make sense

            Probably by the single Bing user?

            1. Pirate Dave Silver badge

              Re: Does not make sense

              Ballmer reads El Reg???

              1. David 132 Silver badge
                Coat

                Re: Does not make sense

                He’s not the CEO any more, he’s just a chair person.

  9. deadlockvictim

    Important cloudy metric: hours of unavailability (aka downtime)

    Before you even consider moving cloudwards, you need to know for many hours the service will be unavailable per year and broken down into planned & planned downtime as well as which geographical region, amongst other dimensions.

    It's usually written into SLAs and the figure offered by the cloudy offerers will have to be higher than what you currently get with your on-premises hardware and their support staff.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Important cloudy metric: hours of unavailability (aka downtime)

      you need to know for many hours the service will be unavailable per year

      And how exactly are you going to get that data when it's all unplanned? Oh, wait, you'll ask Microsoft sales people on the golf course, of course, and naturally you even believe them..

    2. hoola Silver badge

      Re: Important cloudy metric: hours of unavailability (aka downtime)

      Correct but if you are on-prem, the costs are (mostly) peaks & troughs not a nice monthly bill that looks smaller.

      That is actually costs far more is irrelevant, the only thing that matters is the monthly cost looks small.

      It is the same for so much that is purchased in recent years. The only figure people look at is the monthly cost, sod how long it is for or if you actually own anything.

  10. localzuk

    Downtime?

    Those deriding cloud seem to be missing a rather key issue - downtime happens onsite as well. And many organisations don't have the funds or expertise to maintain the same level of service as the big cloud players do.

    Schools, for example. Running an on-prem email server is very difficult, vs "use Office 365". Having a fully resilient system is expensive - vs "use Office 365"...

    1. NewModelArmy

      Re: Downtime?

      Is it possible that the impact of a local server(s) failing temporarily has an impact on one business, but when Microsoft fuck up it impacts many businesses, and the total cost is vastly more than a single business issue ?

      I wonder how much this costs the UK for the outage as it affects so many people.

    2. AnotherName

      Re: Downtime?

      But Office(insert number less than 365 here) is not resilient. What is the real cost of local support vs. cloud subscriptions? What is the real cost of downtime to an organisation? What about somewhere big, like the NHS, with Office offline?

      When the cloud was first offered as a solution, it was assumed that your data would be available from anywhere at any time and it would be held in multiple locations to make it resilient in terms of access, security and backups. Everything is fine while it works, but one screw-up seems to be able to take it all down at once.

    3. yakacm

      Re: Downtime?

      Schools don't exist in isolation, or at least they don't in the UK, they are part of a local authority which are massive organisations, for instance the LA I work for, has something like 25,000 users, so not too sure why any school would have it's own email server. Prior to the cloud their email server would have been in a council computer centre somewhere. And yes there can be local outages, but there is usually a backup server, or traffic can be rerouted, whatever, my point being there are options. With the cloud all that is out of your hands. It's like the difference between driving and flying, at least when you're driving you are in control.

      1. localzuk

        Re: Downtime?

        LAs are not "in control" directly of most school IT. It is delegated and not centralised.

        Trusts like Somerset, that used to run an email service for them, have abandoned that service - as the cost of running it is significant compared with Office 365 or Google.

        The idea that a school or even an LA has the same level of support or capability as, say, Microsoft or Google is hilarious.

        1. AJ MacLeod

          Re: Downtime?

          What a stupid comparison... why would an organisation require the IT capabilities of Google to run a couple of Email servers?

          1. swm

            Re: Downtime?

            QMail is quite reliable and can easily handle a school's email.

      2. hoola Silver badge

        Re: Downtime?

        Not any more, most school now are part of Academy Trusts, business with huge teams of CEOs, Executives Heads and admin staff all sucking money out of the system. Pretty much everything schools use now is some sort of cloud service or SaaS provided by a "specialist company". For the latter look no further than the biometric stuff that is forced on pupils for the highly dangerous and complex task of paying for a meal. Apparently using a fingerprint means the system can bring up a photo so that they can see if the pupil matches.

        That an ID card with a barcode/QR code could do the same thing is irrelevant.

        Sorry, this one really pissed me off when my kids were at high school. It was SaaS sold to the trust for a huge subscription that promptly made all the queues 3 or 4 times as long because the stupid finger pint readers were incapable or reliably detecting a finger print.

        Academy Trusts all sound fuzzy wuzzy warm and somehow dedicated to doing the best for the schools. They are just businesses taking tax payer's money and putting it into manglement's pockets.

        1. Fred Daggy Silver badge
          Meh

          Re: Downtime?

          ... always did wondered how that would work for identical twins (or triplets, or more).

          What would happen if they both (or all three) denied incurring the charge. Both deny responsibility with plausible deniability and no charge to either account? Probably some legalese that says "Tough luck, your bear it, you pay for it".

        2. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

          Re: Downtime?

          "That an ID card with a barcode/QR code could do the same thing is irrelevant."

          And you want to deny the child lunch because they left their card at home/had it nicked by the school bully/fell down a drain?

          Unfortunately, it's the kids that need a hot lunch the most that are likely to come from homes where keeping track of school stuff isn't a priority.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Downtime?

      downtime happens onsite as well

      Yes, but then you can at least DO something about it, divert facilities, come up with alternatives - a whole raft of options exist (and can be planned for) that you do not have with the cloudy stuff.

      Of course, they will tell you THEY have all that, but MS has yet again proven that they don't.

      The difference between on prem and cloud is that when on prem goes down it's your problem and you can act, in the cloud it's EVERYBODY'S problem and you can do sod all other than wait and moan a lot. On a global scale, the impact on productivity is so much greater. Oh, and you don't have a third party holding your data hostage either.

      After the already negative impact of having to use Microsoft products in the first place, going cloudy merely exacerbates it..

      1. localzuk

        Re: Downtime?

        You can do ALL of that with "cloudy stuff" as well. Don't mistake most organisations putting all their eggs in one basket as the only way of using cloud services.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Downtime?

          Pray tell, if your MX records are pointing to MSFT (365) for mail, and you have SPO/Teams, how do you not making it a total clusterfuck to administer/use without putting your eggs in one basket?!

          1. localzuk

            Re: Downtime?

            So you've not heard of backup MX servers then? MX records are explicitly designed to have backup solutions.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Downtime?

              I don't think this will solve the issue of accessing the content of the mailbox as it was before the outage...

            2. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: Downtime?

              That's what I thought originally, but when I tried working out how that would work I ended up with at best a relay holding all incoming messages in queue unless you have the two Exchange servers behind primary and secondary somehow synched. In the Unix world that is not hard, in the Microsoft world that amounts to setting yourself up for a f*ckfest of epic proportions - and that's just inbound. Outbound and stored email? Well, your second priority MX record won't help with that, unless the aforementioned sync exists that server will be empty and even if it weren't, good luck reconfiguring all devices to use the second Exchange server unless you planned ahead (wot, not believing Microsoft's promises? Surely not) and moved it all to a DNS A record that you can quickly change. Again, assuming you manage to get something to sync and not die as well the moment the cloudy part remembered that it was managed by Microsoft and thus failed.

              In short, this again demonstrates that Microsoft went cloudy to pretend to have some support for service resilience in their products. And again failed spectacularly.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Downtime?

          Fair enough point, but what has it got to do with the decrementing uptime counter in O{365 - X} and Microsoft's ability to forestall same?

    5. An_Old_Dog Silver badge
      Flame

      Re: Downtime?

      "don't have the funds or expertise"

      Priorities. Pay the fuckin' money and get someone(s) good -- in-house, or contractor -- to do the work. It's cheaper than the cost to your organization of CloudyServiceX downtime.

      Icon for anger at false economy -->

      (Cloud is great for some things, but usually not for the things it's most-often used for.)

      1. localzuk

        Re: Downtime?

        "It's cheaper than the cost to your organization of CloudyServiceX downtime."

        That depends on the organisation. For a lot of smaller organisations, no, it isn't. Support costs a lot of money.

    6. swm

      Re: Downtime?

      When I was at college we ran a 100 user time sharing system on mainframes. We achieved a 99% scheduled uptime counting every crash for any reason at least a 15 a minute downtime. The main cause of unreliability was total building/college power failure. Maybe not the 99.99999% uptime claimed by the clouds but still noteworthy in the 1970's. Every time you add another 9 you need an order of magnitude greater effort.

  11. Sceptic Tank Silver badge
    Windows

    Rollback procedure

    Tomorrow in the morning meeting: "Ok, let's not ever install Windows on those servers again."

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Rollback procedure

      Should have used the joke icon as that will never happen, it would amount to an admission that someone made a mistake. Not likely to happen.

  12. yakacm

    Hmm

    Hmm, does seem to be a fundamental flaw with the cloud model, if someone snips the cord, your cloud will float away. But what do I know, I'm just an old timer who's been in the industry since the early 80's, I take it these young'uns know what they're doing? Can't lie it seemed better when you could go in to the machine room, and add another sack of coal to old Betsie, the mainframe node, when things got a bit sketchy.

    1. keithpeter Silver badge
      Windows

      Re: Hmm

      My grandad looked after a static steam engine that powered a large flour mill back in the early 60s before he retired. I have actually seen blokes shovel coal into a huge furnace to get the steam up (albeit at a young age).

      Some change in a bit more than half a century. Humans could be really dangerous if they got organised.

      Icon: obvious

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Teams offline. Massive global upsurge in productivity reported.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Cloud...

    Other peoples computers you have no control over.

    1. AnotherName

      Re: The Cloud...

      And your own data, which you also no longer have control over - or access to.

  15. Ball boy Silver badge

    It's all about risk management

    If your OS is sourced from a single supplier then you're at risk of them having an off-day when they roll out an update (sure, you can mitigate by extensively testing their updates before allowing them - but that does rather sound like doing their QA for them). However, if you then decide to place your business' email and working files in a cloud owned by the same software vendor then you're multiplying your risk considerably: not only could their cloud connections cause issues, but their own internal rollout of their own update could take you down (question: when they release an update, do they extensively test it before rolling it out across their cloud? I think we should be told!)

    Put simply: the more you rely on a single supplier, the greater your risk. Use the cloud if that suits your operational/financial processes. Rely one one vendor for your OS and mainstream business apps too, if have to. Just be aware that placing all your eggs in one basket doesn't usually work out as the best strategy if business continuity is your objective - but then, we all know that, right? Right?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: It's all about risk management

      Nope. Few people have heard about cascade failure, and even less implement some segregation or countermeasures. Hello domino effect..

  16. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Caveat Emptor ...... and MSFT investor too

    The much more pressing future concern for Microsoft to presently consider is can they deliver the customers and services AI wants .... for that is what is required of their business in order for its programs to survive and prosper and lead in advanced fields of virtual endeavour and free market enterprise.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Caveat Emptor ...... and MSFT investor too

      I suspect the primary use of the AI for Microsoft is to come up with new and innovative excuses for why their products and services fail or are horrifically hard to secure. Hence the investment, apparently that is cheaper than actually fixing the code..

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You got this all wrong

    Microsoft merely tried to raise productivity in all connected companies. If that had been the case they would have charged you more for NOT restarting services. More profit, you see..

  18. YetAnotherXyzzy

    I just want to thank the author and editor for quoting rather than (argh!) screenshotting social media messages in this article.

  19. bregister
    Joke

    Every cloud has a silver lining.

  20. Miss Config
    Thumb Down

    Who uses outlook anyway ?

    About a year ago I saw a van on the street that had the email address of the business painted on the side.

    It said : @outlook.com.

    I am a bit embarassed to note how slowly it took me to realise that that was a Microsoft address.

    At least on vans, email addresses are mostly gmail nowadays and the outlook van was almost an historical curiosity.

    1. AndrueC Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Who uses outlook anyway ?

      Anything other than owning your own domain is pretty naff. At least with outlook.com you know the driver can afford to pay for mail services.

      1. Smirnov

        Re: At least with outlook.com you know the driver can afford to pay for mail services.

        No, you can't. Outlook.com is a free webmail service like Gmail, although you can pay extra for more storage and less ads.

  21. Fred Daggy Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Don't be that guy.

    "I feel bad for the guy who pulled the trigger on the change that has caused this firestorm."

    Never be that guy. At a certain level, always have your changes signed off. By a technical and business team. It is funny to watch our Network Director say "it's been tested by 'networking company' in the lab and there should be no problems". Then, as a group, everyone in the Change Approval meeting said "No, we need a war room and business testers".

    Once burnt, many times shy.

    (Network Director has everyone take an instant dislike to him. It saved a lot of time.)

  22. Adam JC

    Couldn't have come at a worse time..

    Considering we got an email from our CSP provider giving us the absolutely brilliant news that Microsoft are jacking up ALL their 365 CSP prices (Bar Azure..) by ~9% on April 1st 2023 in the UK (I WISH this was an April fool).

    That'll be the second price increase in less than 6 months, makes it extremely hard for those MSP's selling month-to-month to give any kind of customer reassurance to pricing whatsoever, as Microsoft have also said they'll be re-evaluating their pricing based on USD/GBP fluctuation every 6 months and the cynic in me seriously doubts this means prices will drop at any point, even if the USD/GBP rate reflects this!

  23. jollyboyspecial

    Down?

    As usual there seems to have been a bit of hyperbole in the reporting. Reporting it as "down" implies that the whole lot and caboodle was down, bit that only some users couldn't sign in. One of may favourite reports I saw today reported this as if it were some sort of international disaster on the scale of the whole internet being down. Further down the article they started that 5000 users in the UK were impacted. That isn't a significant number at all. Turns out that their 5000 figure came from doendetector, hardly a reliable source, but even so all that hyperbole looked ridiculous if you read down far enough to find them reporting at only 5000 users were affected.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Down?

      This morning, I couldn't log onto the work VPN with SSO then when that finally worked Outlook and Teams started up and showed no new mail (Outlook) or hung (Teams). Total time lost after rebooting, retrying, rebooting, etc... 30 mins. Seemed pretty down to me.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Down?

      I did wonder if we were unique at our office with our Teams, Outlook etc working fine today.

    3. AndrueC Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: Down?

      The only thing I noticed was the URI link authentication in emails was a bit slow. We run a lot of our servers on Azure and I didn't hear of any customer complaints. Certainly nothing like the flood we get when something big goes wrong.

      It's still not a good look and I'd like to know why Europe keeps taking the brunt of these as other posters have wondered. But it seems like a it was a small storm in a large teacup.

    4. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

      Re: Down?

      The Azure storage for our product stopped working. So, no hyperbole.

  24. captain veg Silver badge

    fail

    There was a time that I would expect el Reg to break IT-related stories first.

    That time appears to be past.

    The Graun broke this so long ago now that it's not even on their front page any more.

    https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jan/25/microsoft-investigates-outage-affecting-teams-and-outlook-users-worldwide

    That's date 09.53 GMT. El Reg picked it up at 11.30.

    Massive fail.

    -A.

    1. druck Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: fail

      The US based staff were probably still in bed.

      1. Missing Semicolon Silver badge

        Re: fail

        I did ponder the lack of this on the front page. In fact, until I googled it I didn't see it, as this story never appeared on the front page for me!

      2. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: fail

        and since they are using M365 they didn't get the mail

  25. sanmigueelbeer
  26. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    Facepalm

    How many nines is this?

    One?

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