Microsoft wants to link satellites to Azure – but it should probably fix its cloud first: Cooling outage hits UK COVID-19 portal, other sites Microsoft is said to be eyeing up linking people to Azure via satellite – just as its cloud platform partially tripped over in the UK, derailing the country's coronavirus statistics page. The Windows giant today advised customers that one of its southern UK Azure zones is right now offline, and has been for more than four …
To be fair, reading though Azure pricing structue, their FAQs and 'learn more' documents don't make it clear that you need to pay extra for redundancy. Cloud services have always been sold on the idea that they are distributed and that the provider handles all the maintenance, load balancing etc.
This all makes it sound like Borkzilla are selling 'off site data center' services as if they are full cloud services. But then, when have they not overhyped everything they sell.
Last weekend I was on day twelve of quarantine after returning to the UK, and eager to be able leave the house again, when I developed some suspicious symptoms including a definitive viral infection.
The symptoms started on Saturday but I wasn’t able to book a test until Tuesday. I know Serco (who are the people behind the misnamed NHS Test and Trace, it’s not run by the NHS) are having all sorts of issues with testing capacity but the problems started way earlier, on the government website.
Quite often the pathway through the steps would just fail and you’d be sent back to the frontpage to fill in all your details again, and submit buttons felt like they were timing out and you weren’t sure whether they were registered,
I tried three different browsers, disabled ad blockers, used incognito sessions all to no avail. It seemed like a server side issue.
Needless to say, I got an appointment which nobody could find on the system once I got to the testing site. Fortunately I took a screenshot to prove I got that far in the web process. I did manage to get a test done (negative) but I can imagine that a lot of people who are not that tech savvy would have just given up even making an appointment.
It seems we’re heading head first into a second wave and we still don’t have the basics of testing working.
Don't forget that It's your tax money that would have been paying (and paying a lot) for the extra resilience.
A company loses money if its website is down, because the business goes elsewhere. The government does not. You'll just have to pay your taxes/get divorced/apply for benefits another time.
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