Oops, they did it again: Microsoft breaks Outlook with another dubious update Users of Microsoft's email service might be feeling a distinct sense of déjà vu after the web version of Outlook last night blocked access to Exchange Online mailboxes. According to Microsoft, the problem was due to "a recent change made to a portion of Outlook on the web infrastructure, that may have resulted in impact." …
"The Register asked Microsoft how it validates its changes and what assurance it could give customers that this issue won't be repeated. The company is yet to respond."
Saying f'all means they'll do f'all.
Get me one of those.... --->
I'm preparing for a meeting, or rather should be (instead I'm reading ElReg).
However this is not just Microsoft.
Pretty much all software or cloud service appears to suffer from these issues now.
Agile - the way forward
Do stuff really fast
Test a bit of it and hope for the best
Do more stuff really fast
Five a few of the badly broken bits from 1 but break even more other stuff
Do more stuff really fast
Continue delivering a pile of shite that everyone just accepts because at some point "Agile" was considered the only way to do things.
I think it's rather unfair to accuse Microsoft of not testing updates etc.
They have a very robust process testing process that uses literally millions of instances to ensure that almost every possible build of machine and combination of software or network configuration that could possibly exist in the world can be accounted for. And it uses the very modern method of crowd sourcing.
M$ has become notorious for releasing poorly tested code and reusing known bad code libraries that reintroduce vulnerabilities to new releases.
This code broke a web application. Not a lot of user side variables to test against, so they are totally to blame in this instance.
"According to Microsoft, the problem was due to "a recent change made to a portion of Outlook on the web infrastructure, that may have resulted in impact."
Reverting the change did the trick, and service was restored, but the question must be asked – does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?"
My derision for Microsoft knows no bounds. lolol as they say in the classics.
From article: does Microsoft test its changes before deploying to production?
They USED to...
The testing department got "mostly pink-slipped" about a year before Win-10-nic released, according to grok. The tester to developer ratio was dropped from 2:1 to about 1:1, and the developer role apparently became "tester/developer" (or similar). They BASICALLY decided to rely on insiders, home users, etc. to validate their "cram it up your xxx" forced updates before getting the enterprise users updated. THAT has been their new model, ever since.
The orange, rasi winning, former entertainer, and his soap box derby car maker, hanger on are destroying trust in the US as a trust worthy partner for data, business, or anything really. That is on top of a series of headwinds including, anti competitive practices finally getting fines, the slow realisation that subscriptions are not always better value, and the self owns from providers like Microsoft. Some of the more cautious organisations who's workloads that are not yet in the cloud, and some who are finding less utility and more cost in their cloud deployments may be considering keeping upgrades on their own systems in their own data centers (DCs) or moving back out of the cloud. This is not yet a large scale movement but if Microsoft keep hiking prices and going down and the US doesn't remove uncertainty over security and other partnerships some of those clouds might condense and the workloads may rain down on organisations own DCs and co location providers.
Didn't see this at the time sorry. They are not causal in this, they just make a bad outlook worse, who knows why they claim that is today or what the real motivation is. Things like stopping opposing Russia, gutting CISA, and ignoring international agreements/norms just don't make it easy to argue in the postmortems on major cloud outage caused incidents, that keeping your data or services with US providers is a safe bet. I know a presidenst is term limited but if Microsoft are bad at the same time that could be long enogh to do some damage.
Updating, or not, should always be a choice.
From apps that take existing features to make them "premium extras" or add even more intrusive advertising, to MICROS~1's continuing inability to properly test the shit that it releases (and a special shout out here to HP for their firmware updates)....all updates should be highly recommended, yes, scream that the sky may fall even, but always always let the user say "don't".
(and it would help greatly if all updates said what has actually been changed/done/fixed instead of some mindless twaddle about enhancing the user experience or, worse, "Some bugs fixed")
Whilst I agree in the short term (and given most consultants tenure/ managers bonus timelines that seems to be all that counts) most businesses cant simply un-tether from Microsoft that it is not a small undertaking. It is however possible there are many businesses who's back-end is primarily Oracle Linux, Red Hat, IBM system i, or even open source. Some newer businesses allow their employees to use not only windows, mac or Linux to work on but also mobile os on phones or tablets. Established businesses or those that have built up a more recent dependency on client side software that is windows only as well as those who work in fields where the school college and university education of staff prepare them to do job x with y program on windows do have a cultural challenge as well on the client side but desktop, dhcp, DNS, Kerberos, LDAP, SQL, Email, word processing, accounting, analytics and whatever else Microsoft claim to deliver can be done by others. Microsoft dominates now but no one thought computers would replace typewrites, no one thought anyone would rival IBM, I am not saying it will be anytime soon or the user-base has given any indication it will be because of bad service, I am just saying they are not immune to change in the market and if something else comes along they might not be dominant forever.
How about Apple? I keep seeing people with Apple corporate laptops so it must be feasible for someone
Speaking as someone who does Mac support (amongst other things) - they mostly use the MS Office stuff as local clients, not the webbified stuff (which is only used as a backup if their machine is down for some reason..)
This company just cannot write email software properly. Actually, they can't write any software properly. Windows/office has become so large and unwieldy that they themselves don't know how to make it work any more. And they don't need to do testing. People are used to shite service, so that's what they get.
The difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Microsoft keep steering their customers into corners, making them stop using X, start using Y etc. Apple just don't do it so blatantly and so much. There's no part of Apple's MacOS that tells you off for trying to use Chrome instead of Safari in the same way that Windows tells you off for using Chrome instead of Edge. That's just one example.
Their QA is the most appalling QA in the industry. They're bullies, and they're greedy bullies. A bit like HP.
Yeah, all it needs to do is be 1000X worse and it'll be as bad as the classic version of Outlook.
I'm counting the days until it's no longer supported. that's exactly what the corporate IT departments need as an excuse to remove it from everything. Then we'll be free from having to make all the HTML emails IE 5 compatible (yes, seriously).
I run a small IT business supporting local businesses. I actively refuse to be "admin" on systems that I have zero control over.
I know I don't have much say over Windows updates, but I can delay, diagnose and rollback patches. 365 offers none of these options, so I refuse to take on ownership of 365 problems.
I've not been able to get into my parish council emails from home. We don't have the budget to fight this mess, and as you said, there's nothing our IT chappie can do about it because it's the underlying fundaments that's gone titsup. Like demanding the janitor restore the electricity when the substation is on fire.
Your IT chappie could spend the few quid a year it costs to set up a domain and an email service with somebody like Mythic Beasts* and access them with a genuine email client like Thunderbird, downloading the emails to your own device. (You could leave the emails online but would then eventually have to pay a few quid more a year for for storage. If your IT chappie can't work out how to do that you need a new one.
* Other registrars and MSPs are available.
The computer in the library doesn't have Thunderbird. My tablet I use at work doesn't have Thunderbird. The PC in my mate's house doesn't have Thunderbird. My smartphone doesn't have Thunderbird. The *entire* *point* of accessing email via web access is accessing email via anything that has a web browser, without needing to have controlling access to the device you're using or even having to have a device that even has the concept of "controlling" it.
I sent a telex (before fax!) to Bill Gates in 1982 asking about issues with the garbage collection routines in 8K Microsoft Basic and I am STILL waiting for a reply.
(I was part of the Oric computer development team).
So I'm not surprised that they are slow in replying to this latest issue!
Paul
PS. Garbage Collection is to do with how Basic deals with discarded data (mainly text strings) to free up memory.
Could this outcome of events have indirectly influenced millions of Win7 users years ago to call a halt in their future personal participation in M$ experiments as test dummies?
I am one of those still using Win7 fully security updated through Jan 2026. For 2 years my secondary OS has been Zorin Core (Linux). It becomes my primary OS in 2026. This Win10/11 saga with telemetry (we called it spyware) & forced updates that now have a 100% fail rate was foretold. Seems the same pervasive disease has spread to all of their software.
It would seem to be something someone would rather watch than participate in. Going to go now & check my Proton email. (They provide a full range of services that actually work.) Funny thing is I have not heard from anyone using M$ email services in awhile. Anyone else? ;>))
