back to article Where are we now, Microsoft 362.5? Europe reports outages

Some Microsoft 365 users in Western Europe earlier today were reporting service problems today, though those in the UK seem to have avoided many of the issues. A scan of comments from users on Reddit show a range of complaints from error messages while trying to open Outlook to outages to LinkedIn being down. Users in Sweden, …

  1. Korev Silver badge
    Gimp

    Does anyone else think that the big cloud vendors are now too big? One glitch in one of the providers now takes out a huge amount of the planet's infrastructure.

  2. katrinab Silver badge
    Trollface

    No, Microsoft 356

    I've always called it Microsoft 356, and I think that is a more accurate number.

    1. b0llchit Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: No, Microsoft 356

      Says the Optimist

    2. Excellentsword (Written by Reg staff)

      Re: No, Microsoft 356

      Coming soon to a Register headline near you

    3. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: No, Microsoft 356

      356 & 3/4

      Give them credit for the leap day they haven't fallen over at

  3. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    IT is long past time for a Class Action lawsuit against

    these companies.

    They promise 99.99999% uptime but deliver a lot less. (The jury is still out on that one as to what it actually is)

    Putting all these services 'somewhere' and on 'someone else's kit' is a beancounters wet dream but for the rest of us they are an absolute nightmare.

    1. MatthewSt Silver badge

      Re: IT is long past time for a Class Action lawsuit against

      By all means give it a go but you may want to get your numbers right first. They promise 99.9% uptime on a monthly basis, so they're allowed 43 minutes of downtime per month **per service**. Then the terms (which you've accepted by signing up of course) tell you that it's only a financially backed guarantee so you get a percentage of your bill back.

      I think you're probably better off trying to file a lawsuit against your beancounters if it's that detrimental to your business.

  4. Mike007 Silver badge

    I do wonder how it really compares to self hosted.

    10% of the world down for a few hours at the same time is more newsworthy than 50% of companies having 1 day outages at different times for different reasons spread across the year.

    When an outage hits a smaller company they rarely have the ability to get back online in a couple of hours.

    1. pdh

      Yes, exactly. In my many years of experience with on-prem systems, I never saw a single one that could boast of 100% reliability over any medium or long term timeframe. But when ABC Co's internal network goes down, they don't post the details on a public status page like cloud providers do, and their employees don't take to Twiitter to bash the IT department. I'm certainly not suggesting the cloud is always better than on-prem -- it is not -- but I bet that the major cloud providers' overall uptime is way better than almost all on-prem facilities.

      1. Ragarath

        I'd say yes there may be more downtime in on-prem (if not properly specced or not enough budget to spec right,) but the crucial question is is it more disruptive?

        Most of the time with on-prem from my experience, it's a single service that is down. Not everything.

        1. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

          it's a single service that is down. Not everything

          Previous orkplace the aircon for the (new) server room was wired to the lighting circuit for the floor. Which got shut down once a week so that work could be done. The aircon wasn't configured to come back up automatically..

          When we got in in the morning, the air temperature in the server room was 65C. The servers (Sun [1] mostly) were struggling, but still up. One Sparc disk array 1 had fallen over but, once things cooled down, we powered it back up and had only lost 2 drives out of the 20 or so in the array.

          Next maintenance window, the aircon was put on a dedicated circuit with a big "Do not switch off" label taped over the switch. *And* the aircon was reconfigured to default to powering up automatically..

          [1] Yes, it was that long ago. Pre-y2k from memory.. or maybe just post-y2k

    2. Lazlo Woodbine Silver badge

      When I worked for a subsidiary of a huge US globocorp, our entire network was once taken out for three whole days because someone hit reply all to an all staff email, which prompted someone to hit reply all to ask people not to hit reply all, etc...

      The ensuing storm filled up all the mail servers and took the global network down while the network team deleted the emails.

      I wonder how the likes of Gmail or Office 3xx would cope with a reply all storm?

    3. terry 1

      All my clients are on-prem, no 365 anywhere. But my biggest is on Exchange 2016 since Nov 2015, they have three outages, 2 x internet (now has failover) and once when the Breakfix engineer replaced the drives under warranty. So our uptime has been very good.

    4. CrazyOldCatMan Silver badge

      I do wonder how it really compares to self hosted

      Has a better uptime than us currently..

      (LSS - 4 chillers in the server room. Due to lack of maintenance [1] two of them don't work. A day or so ago, the other two turned themselves off. One managed to come back online when we power-cycled it, the other one is deader than Boris' political career..)

      [1] We are not allowed to do it - it's the responsibility of Building Maintenance. And, apparently, fixing the server room aircon (or even making sure it's serviced regularly) is *expensive* so it hasn't been done.. Well, it's a damn sight more expensive doing an emergency callout for an aircon engineer then rapidly buying two mobile units when you discover that they have a 2-day lead time as well as having the entire dev team sit around doing nothing because their servers can't be bought up because the 1 working aircon unit wouldn't be able to cope and will go into thermal shutdown again... I think we'll be taking over the aircon maintenance from now on.

    5. NoneSuch Silver badge
      FAIL

      "I do wonder how it really compares to self hosted."

      When self-hosted you know which engineer to call and not be in a queue with hundreds of other O356 victims waiting for some page turner to "help' you before escalating. (With optional survey at the end, just press #2)

      When MS came out with the Azure Cloud while limiting options for on-prem, no one objected and they all deserve what they get.

  5. xyz Silver badge

    LinkedIn down, Teams down...

    PAAARRRTTTTYYY!!!!!!

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