back to article Microsoft 365 remains 'degraded' as Azure outage resolved

Microsoft's 365 subscription services are down for some users, as the software titan also reports the Central US region of its Azure cloud is experiencing problems. Azure's status page advises that since approximately 21:56 UTC on July 18 "a subset of customers may experience issues with multiple Azure services in the Central …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Remember that there is no such thing as a "cloud", you're just borrowing someone else's computer.

    1. Phil Kingston

      Darn. I was hoping to get in before some muppet made that comment

      1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        Apparently, you mean some other muppet . . .

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      That's why I refuse to use my work laptop - I told my boss that the commentards on El Reg have taught me not to trust or use someone else's computer.

    3. matjaggard

      Honestly, who do you think reads The Register? We know what a cloud is!

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Really? Come on, describe - no cheating with a search engine or GrabGPT..

        :)

        1. phuzz Silver badge

          Easy; "someone else's computer", it's right there a few comments further up! /s

          Realistically though, I doubt you could write a single definition which would satisfy everyone. Personally I call it 'the modern implementation of the mainframe/terminal system'.

          1. ExpatZ

            Not really.

            It is a the latest iteration of the virtual machine management system with orchestration, SDN/SDS/container capabilities that is fully distributed across multiple nodes and or datacenters depending on how you build it.

            It is the new VMWare, lots of additional features and a new added feature of being multi compute frame and distributed with all the coolness that brings but it is exactly that at its most basic: the new VMWare.

            It has a lot of bells and whistles and some serious advantages over VMWare but at its core that is what it is and all it does.

            It is not a monolithic shared system like a mainframe or terminal server system of old.

            Have every worked with mainframe or terminal systems?

            I have.

            Cloud is not that.

            PUBLIC cloud os someone elses set of computers that you have no control over in any way and must hope that the people you are paying for it know what they are doing, it is the hope strategy to running your IT.

            Use a private cloud IF you need cloud at all.

            The vast majority do not.

            1. Jim 68

              Re: Not really.

              I have worked with both Honeywell and IBM mainframe and terminal systems with Internet or similar distributed redundant resources.

              If you cut to the chase and ignore the hype and jargon, cloud largely is the same thing, just more cleverly marketed.

        2. Shaha Alam

          how about this for a definition:

          cloud: the nebulous place where risk assessments get an automatic green tick, and everyone celebrates until the day the root cert expires and some poor server-ops member gets a 2am call.

        3. Korev Silver badge
          Black Helicopters

          >> Honestly, who do you think reads The Register? We know what a cloud is!

          > Really? Come on, describe - no cheating with a search engine or GrabGPT..

          Wake up Sheepie, the Cloud is what they make with Chemtrails...

      2. ExpatZ

        Oh really?

        My impression is that no one here has actully worked with one or has had do the company budgets regarding one.

        My impression is that you all read web sites and articles extolling the virtues and that you come here to pretend you know what you are talking about but that none of you is actually in IT in any way that gets you paid.

      3. Stoneshop

        We know what a cloud is!

        Yes.

        That white, grey or even blackish fluffy stuff you can encounter in the Big Blue Room which turns it less blue, area-wise. Leaking clouds are commonly called rain; if the leakage is kind of solid it's snow or hail.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      .. and worse, that computer is running Windows.

      Let's all rely on an operating system that has only really worked for gaming, shall we?

  2. MatthewSt Silver badge

    Post-mortem

    Microsoft usually go into some detail in their "what went wrong" documents. Looking forward to reading this one!

    1. Howard Long

      Re: Post-mortem

      Microsoft also usually have another catastrophic event a few months later.

      Rinse and repeat.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Post-mortem

        So you're saying they're well-practiced, eh? ;-)

    2. Julian Poyntz

      Re: Post-mortem

      Crowdstrike have provided the perfect reason

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Post-mortem

      That will be about 1MB in tracking code and metadata and one line:

      "You used our products and services."

      :)

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    So, Office 345 is down again

    And what are customers going to get in return ? A voucher for some free time on Teams ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: So, Office 345 is down again

      A discount on more installations, obviously.

    2. Catkin Silver badge

      Re: So, Office 345 is down again

      Depends how you define 'customers', I'm thinking the return is early pub'o'clock.

    3. deadlockvictim

      Re: So, Office 345 is down again

      Customers will get an explanation, which might even be true.

      Oh, and maybe the realisation that they are stuck with «Cloud provider» and that there is little that they can do that does not involve a lot of hassle & expense and possibly trying to re-hire all of the sysadmins & DBAs that were let go because they were not needed no more.

    4. ExpatZ

      Re: So, Office 345 is down again

      Depends on the SLA's, if they had good negotiators they'll get a hefty discount or maybe free services/cash for the losses.

      If not they'll get fingered.

  4. harrys Bronze badge

    why did i make so much money for ms during my career, what an idiot !!!

    i dont make much monies out of the followng but feels good whenever i accomplish it...

    move over small, less than 10 user, business's over too synology directory services / libreoffice were possible / linux mint were possible / firefox / 3cx

    with 50% of my time devoted to re-education.... hence the lack of profit :)

    but then i can afford my morality as i made sure i didnt burden myself with a big mortgage during my career... the self certification of income days of mortgage applications were a mad mad time

    a drop in the ocean .... but its MY drop :)

  5. mahan

    "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."

    - Douglas Adams

    How true this is for the Cloud. The man was totally ahead if his time.

    1. Mike Pellatt

      He entirely predicted what AI is doing to us

  6. rw.aldum

    Crowdstrike keeps striking

  7. Bebu
    Windows

    Hitting Australia as well

    local media reported it might be a related to problems with Crowdstrike services.

    That would be interesting and not entirely unforeseen by this cynical old sod. :)

    I thought it might be the internet's Zeitgeist rebelling at the guff currently coming out of Milwaukee. Their invoking the Almighty so casually and so frequently borders on blasphemy to my mind. Although I take comfort in the observation: quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

    1. xanadu42
      Facepalm

      Re: Hitting Australia as well

      Affected infrastructure includes Banks, Petrol Stations, Airports, Airlines, Fast-Food "restaurants", TV stations and supermarkets - and the list seems to be growing by the hour...

      So much for putting everything into one basket - er, "cloud"

      The M$ cloud seems to work exactly opposite to how they claim it works...

      Maybe they should rename Azure to "Egg Basket"?

      Just wonder how many managers are now regretting getting rid of their "real" IT teams and moving everything to the "cloud"?

      1. ExpatZ

        Re: Hitting Australia as well

        None, they usually have no idea what they are doing and moved to Azure from Openstack, Proxmox or VMWare because some Microsoft salesperson took them to a nice restaraunt and fed them a ton of garbage about how it will be cheaper, help reduce staff and be safer with more uptime.

        And being muppets without a clue, no IT experience and a business degree they bought the lies and made the moves and will now defend them because to to do otherwise would call their own positions into question.

        They'll double down and then keep their heads down until their clueless managers move on to some other decision based on finger in the wind sales nonesense.

        That at least has been my experience in the industry where such dumb and self defeating moves have been made.

      2. Julian Poyntz

        Re: Hitting Australia as well

        Its not AzureCloud, it is others. Just depends on what the client is running and has configured.

        I know of an ex client who was impacted somewhat, and their cloud is NOT MS. I did wonder as I knew they had crowdstrike on their EUC - so I guess public facing services are now back and running, but internally, I suspect a lot of people will need to head into an office PDQ to get their kit sorted out.

    2. lightweight

      Re: Hitting Australia as well

      Much of New Zealand is down, too. Just picked up family from the airport and *all* the arrival & departure screens, all kiosks, all commerce/tills, everything is down/blue screen. The broad dependence on 'enterprise Windows' is total folly. If there's any justice in the world, a lot of IT decision makers will be looking for new jobs (not in IT!) tomorrow.

      1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

        Re: Hitting Australia as well

        >Much of New Zealand is down

        Cheer up. I know it's winter but at least you're not Australian

  8. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

    Microsoft 365 remains in a degraded condition wiith many services unavailable to some users.

    Business as usual, then?

    1. DJV Silver badge
      Facepalm

      Damn, I came here to post exactly the same thing!

  9. This post has been deleted by its author

  10. Roger Kynaston
    Pint

    DNS

    It's DNS, it is always DNS.

    I bet someone forgot to put the trailing . on a CNAME

    -> because lots of microsofties are going to need one soon.

    1. ExpatZ

      Re: DNS

      It was a bad patch.

      Like it always is.

    2. Jim 68

      Re: DNS

      DNS was intended to be a truly distributed system. Not one owned by Cloudflare.

      Most people don't even operate a DNS server. They just link to a service provider.

      So all it takes is one low wage "technician" to typo something and the whole Internet collapses.

  11. lightweight

    Enterprise computing monocultures

    Just like their natural analogues, digital monocultures are fragile... and their inherent instability is readily obvious to many people. Not to most 'enterprise' software decision makers. Nor to the Microsoft Corporation. Apparently. I'm afraid I'm enjoying the delightful glow of Schadenfreude right now (happy that I've actively engineered my personal & professional life to be free of Microsoft and monocultures in general).

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge
      Thumb Up

      Re: Enterprise computing monocultures

      Indeed. Companies actually have a vested interest in not outsourcing key services to a single entity but the expected savings dwarf the vague potential risks in the beancounters eyes. I'd rather not see regulation directly for this, because it tends to be either too broad or too narrow and inflexible, but would hope that relevant "IT resiliency" insurance becomes compulsory and that this, over time, can improve practices.

      1. Shaha Alam

        Re: Enterprise computing monocultures

        I tend to agree about IT resiliency insurance, but this is only looking at it from the perspective of the business and not its clients and customers.

        Lets say Easyjet goes down and all of its customers cant fly on that day. that's customers, their travel insurance (if they have it), hotels, car hires, excursions, and all manner of downstream impacts. In an ideal world money changes hands and people are 'kept happy'. But that resilience insurance does not factor in any of that stuff.

        We're already in a world where 'paying off' someone is supposed to be some compensation for failure to deliver a service - to the point that some businesses base their entire proposition on knowing they will not deliver a service and factoring the risk of paying refunds. if the risk calculation is in their favour, they have no issues with that as a viable commercial offering, knowing that they'll be screwing a certain percentage of their customers (parking companies come to mind).

        there needs to be a higher standard. one where the company prioritises service delivery rather than risk mitigation. Otherwise, we'll have a world filled with Boengs.

      2. EnviableOne

        Re: Enterprise computing monocultures

        see the NIS2 directive, basically legislating resilience to the important parts of industry in the entire EU

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Weird..

    .. it's as if nobody has ever heard of cascade failure and planned for it.

    1. ttlanhil
      Trollface

      Re: Weird..

      What makes you think no-one planned this cascading failure?

      1. ExpatZ

        Re: Weird..

        Because this is not a thing that gets planned, it is incompetence.

        Take off the foil hat, in IT incompetence is what allows hackers to do what they do and this wasn't a hack, it was a crappy untested patch/procedure.

        Like always.

        1. EnviableOne

          Re: Weird..

          Hanlons razor to the fore.

          but there are those that are in more than one cloud, in more than one region, and more than one availability zone.

          if your going to go cloud, do it properly, if your not big enough to do it properly, don't do it.

        2. ttlanhil

          Re: Weird..

          Yeah, I know, just another mistake that ended up affecting huge numbers of people.

          Hence the trollface icon

  13. Mishak Silver badge

    Just goes to show...

    How bad it's all going to be when a disaster (natural or <insert name of crazy dictator / autocrat>) causes a global technology failure.

    1. ExpatZ

      Re: Just goes to show...

      Gonna be bad.

      Most organisations have no idea what they are doing or what IT security is.

      To most organisations IT is a cost center, something they have to deal with, something to spend as little as they can on and that includes their support staff running it.

      Those guys will multiply the effects for the rest of us that do know what we are doing making it more difficult to fend off the damage.

    2. cyberdemon Silver badge
      Mushroom

      Re: Just goes to show...

      Exactly.. What happens when all a world's critical systems are networked and inter-dependent?

      The opening episode of Battlestar Galactica springs to mind ...

      1. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

        Re: Just goes to show...

        Only the Cylons are Russian or Chinese.

  14. mark l 2 Silver badge

    And yet the Microsoft share price doesn't seem to get affected by all these widely publicized outages.

    Even my elderly mother who is in her mid 70s and knows absolutely nothing about the cloud, Office 365 or probably what Microsoft even do, just that my job involves computers, messaged me to ask if 'internet strike' as she puts it, has affected my work.

    So its clear the outage has made its way well outside the tech news space. probably because Sky News were affected and weren't shy in blaming Microsoft for their downtime.

    1. TimMaher Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Share price.

      Off 2.3% in pre- market a short while ago.

      CrowdStrike off at least 20% and still falling.

    2. EnviableOne

      At this point outages are priced into the MSFT shares.

      Its diversified enough and has a dominant market position that allows it to not be affected.

      whether the dominant market position is deserved or not is down to your interpretation.

  15. ExpatZ

    Like I keep saying and you keep downvoting...

    Public cloud is great for front ends, epehemeral stuff that needs to spin up for a heavy load then drop back off to a few web/api servers when that load drops.

    Things that can go down and quickly be rerouted, that won't take the whole infra down with it.

    Things without a ton of network traffic or disk/cpu use.

    Small stuff, front ends.

    It is useless and in many cases dangerous and stupid to put your core infra into it or base your entire offering off running in it.

    It is also insanely expensive, arguments to the contrary NEVER hold true and the sales pitches never hold up to actual scrutiny.

    And as every company that makes the move in a big way discovers it costs 2-5 times (or more depending on the underlying application) than a private cloud would cost to run every year, even with datacenter and support staff costs taken into account.

    If you want cloud run a private cloud with a public cloud front end if you feel the need, doing it all in public cloud will empty the company accounts faster than a private cloud will, hit you with this kind of nonsense every year or more and make a situation where your company operates on hope instead of controls when it comes to patching, security, uptime and the quality of the people who run the underlying infrastructure that you are relying on.

    Hope is not a viable business or IT strategy.

    Go ahead and vote this reiteration of reality down like you all everytime I've pointed this out, the world is full of suckers who think spending more is better and there's nothing I can do about that but when it comes to MY infrastructure I can indeed take control and keep it safe from the people you hope will keep yours running.

    Not sure many of you actually are systems admins or IT manageers here any more, seems more like a gathering of basement geeks who have never actually held a job doing it who get all their info from here or some other industry magazine/site.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Like I keep saying and you keep downvoting...

      spot on. the business I work at made the decision for cloud first about 7 years ago and now complain and wonder why Azure is expensive! ;-) We have a DC on site which is less than 5 years old but half empty, the money we spunk in Azure (over £300k) every year would run that including staff, electric and hardware refresh for years!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Like I keep saying and you keep downvoting...

      I'd upvote you except for that last line. Some folks here are, as you put it, "basement geeks", many aren't. In my case, I was until fairly recently, but have been reading El Reg for years - which helped with the transition.

  16. lespaul

    It's like COVID but for computers. Whole world shuts down

  17. Mike 137 Silver badge

    I can't help feeling that "365" is rather akin to "autopilot" -- roll on the Bullshit Age

  18. anonymous boring coward Silver badge

    I can't believe MS actually uses Windows-something as the back-end for 365? Why?

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Because they did what they always do, took what they already have and slapped another layer of crud on top of it.

      One hopes the combo punch of Azure and Crowdstrike on the same day would wake people up to just how precarious this architecture is, but I doubt it.

  19. razorfishsl

    ClownStrike take down clown Computer network

    Wheres My Teeshirt.....

  20. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    If it was July 15th...

    If It was July 15th I would have assumed it was weather related. Derecho with about a 100 mile north-to-south stretch with 70MPH winds along almost the entire thing and 90MPH winds along some stretches, in addition to the several tornadoes in Iowa and major tornado outbreak in Chicago from it.

    2 tornadoes through Des Moines (state capital and has a lot of the internet connectivity for the state running through there, along with Ames due to being along a fiber route for the educational reasearch networks.. Two in Davenport. Ames didn't get any bad weather though). And (assuming they had some stuff in the Chicago area -- which apparently they don't), Chicago had *22* tornadoes, most large and with long tracks (100-600 yards width -- yes the NWS still uses yards and miles... and 2-25 mile length.) Luckily none were strong, under 120MPH winds. Tornado or two through Davenport.

    The weather has been unusually active this year, I've had I think 10 tornadoes pass within 10 miles of my place this year (Iowa does have an active tornado season, but the average within 10 miles is more like 1 to 2 a year...) We've had so many of these now, the tornado sirens went off at like 4AM, I pulled up a radar and saw "Oh, that's going to pass like 2 miles away" and went back to sleep.

    A few weeks ago there was a adar indicated tornado to the west. I step outside and look west and there's this big green-tinted wedge... (the green tint is from hail aloft.) With heavy rain it's impossible to see if a tornado has actually touched down or if you're just looking at a lowering but I got in the car and took off about a mile or two to the north, if it had touched down it would have been about 1/4 mile wide. 4 miles due west, moving east at 50MPH, so I got out about 5 minutes ahead of time. Came back and not even any leaves blown off the trees, it must have skimmed right overhead. Police 5 miles west did report seeing one, losing site of it in the heavy rain, then having their vehicle pelted by flying debris (west of town is countryside so either a farm shed or torn off tree branches most likely.)

    Apparently the ones out west average about 20MPH movement -- midwest here, 50-60MPH. By the time you get to Kentucky, it's normal for them to be going like 80MPH. If you track an edge on a tornado and it doesn't appear to be moving, you're in it's direct path and you might want to move to one side or the other.

    Tell me this isn't climate change... (not specifically July 15th, but the extremely active tornado seasons. Effectively the most active part of tornado alley has shifted east several hundred miles over the last like 10 or 20 years.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: If it was July 15th...

      Are you sure what article you posted to? Or what website?

  21. bigtreeman

    Office 360

    Microsoft 365 (the artist formerly known as Office 365)

    but known to some as Office 360, with 5 days off for bad behaviour.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon

Other stories you might like