Lawyer's Microsoft email snafu goes from $1.75M lawsuit to Ctrl+Alt+Settle The New Jersey attorney who sued Microsoft for $1.75 million claiming verification gremlins had cut him off from his paid work email filed for voluntary dismissal on Friday. The attorney had originally claimed back in June that the snafu had cut him off from judges and clients, meaning he couldn't tackle his caseload, and …
For all we know, he got the whole $1.75M + court costs + legal fees and possibly a working email address.
If there had been some real chance of Microsoft being legally required to provide quality customer support then congressmen and senators would have well funded re-election campaign funds until the judge was replaced and the law was fixed.
We don't know whether a cheque was involved, or maybe someone high up in Microsoft figured out the reason for the loop, extricated the lawyer from said loop (which is what he wanted in the first place), and then offered compensation for damages/inconveniences incurred.
I mean... I would also pull a lawsuit if what I was asking for was eventually delivered... although having the lawsuit rumble through to make a point is a nicety.
I have no issue with MS being punched in the wallet for failing to provide customer service. Going for their money is the only thing these large corpos understand.
US$1.75mn actually sounds low to me if one considers the downstream harm MS's shoddy service may have caused.
Just use your backup email address that your ethical obligations for continuity of service mandate that you have. The IT administrator that you fired and replaced with a cheaper outsourced hell desk can probably advise you on setting that up.
> opened him up to the risk of being accused of serious ethical violations
Is "but he made me do it" a permissible defense for your clients?
Very odd....
I managed to lock myself out of my personal O365 admin account due to my phone with my MFA app on it breaking.
Emailed MS support, answered some questions about my account and got the MFA reset pretty quicky. In terms of fix time it took about 3 days from initial support request and a couple of calls from Microsoft.
Something is very fishy here.
More and more businesses (especially financial orgs) are pushing the 'save a tree, get an email' agenda. With the postal service, put a first class stamp on it an it is legally 'deemed received'.
However, this does not translate to email. Hitting 'send' does not mean the email was necessarily received. I am currently fighting a false positive problem with my ISP's anti-spam technology where legitimate bills & statements are getting routed to a junk folder. This results in missed communications that potentially have financial implications. Unfortunately businesses are doing a CYA with a forced EULA absolving them of responsibility.
As I reflect on this, it is surprising to make this conclusion... For all their faults, the postal service loses far less important communication than modern electronic communications.
I have to disagree. While I do, on occasion, get "real" emails misdirected to my spam folder, it's rare - and they're still in my spam folder. But when the postal service delivers a letter to the wrong address, or outright loses it, I never even know it was sent. And ours typically takes a week for anything to arrive.
If he was without email for 14+ days, that's a big risk in terms of missed deadlines. By initiating proceedings against MS, I'm wondering if that gave him some useful leverage with courts/tribunals to say that not responding/missing deadlines was the fault of MS (despite him making all reasonable efforts and some more) and please can he have an extension on that deadline.
Aren't service providers' liabilities normally limited in cases like this? Same way that if I post something worth millions with just a first class stamp on it and it goes missing, I couldn't then expect Royal Mail to be liable for its value. Given that service providers have no control over the value associated with use of their services and in the absence of any specific guaranteed level of service, then this would seem reasonable. If loss of an email account could have such massive financial consequences for a business, then maybe better business continuity planning was needed?
In the US, the postal service losing a letter with a first class stamp means they have to pay ... oh, nothing at all, they're just expected to make an effort to deliver. Much like insurance on a package just means they have to deliver it - it can be destroyed in transit, but if they can show that the remains were delivered, then no insurance claim.
Trouble is that scammers will use that trick too.
Does anyone here remember the conveyancing crash of 2021?
https://www.estateagenttoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2021/11/largest-online-conveyancer-suffers-long-multiple-systems-outage
I feel for the guy, every so often Microsoft thinks my IP address for my mail server should be banned so I can no longer send to hotmail.* and outlook.com. This appears to be based on something happened to my IP address 13 years ago. I write to them, its ignored, I write again and again and eventually I get a response. I tell them everything I have done, they deny there is a problem, I send them their output stating there is a problem, they still deny it, I keep pressing them and then they tell me it'll be sorted and 48 hours later I get the ability to send email and then six months later it goes again.
They are beyond useless.
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