back to article Update 'designed to improve user experience' takes down the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal

Microsoft's legendary approach to quality was demonstrated this morning as the Microsoft 365 Admin Portal fell over. Without a hint of irony, the company posted: "We've identified a recent service update designed to improve user experience is causing impact." The impact in question was an inability to access the admin portal …

  1. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Facepalm

    We made an update. We fucked up. Again.

    Please accept this 2% increase in contract fees due to supply chain issues. We will correct the problem as soon as we've hired enough of our old employees back as consultants.

    Thank you for testing our applications in our place.

  2. TRT Silver badge

    I wondered what it was...

    I must have caught the last few minutes of it.

  3. ITMA Silver badge

    I'm afraid there is one thing I can say about this....

    WHAT A FUCK UP!!!!!

    Still down with:

    Service Unavailable

    HTTP Error 503. The service is unavailable.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    3 9s....

    I'm guessing even 4 9s is aspirational at Microsoft.

    Still think Office 365 is false advertising...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Happy

      Re: 3 9s....

      Still think Office 365 is false advertising...

      Made me think - maybe Microsoft are being honest: there are actually 365.256 days in a true year, so maybe they think they can afford up to 6 hours of down time per annum without being accused of false advertising...

      1. Kevin Johnston

        Re: 3 9s....

        I still favour the report that the number part of Microsoft's xx365 products is actually in Octal which equates to a decimal 245 days allowing them decimal 120 days outage per year.

        1. herman

          Re: 3 9s....

          At least, that is much better than the 49.5 days of WinME.

      2. Aitor 1

        Re: 3 9s....

        For a certain definition of hours.

        Like 6 hours of your work day.

    2. Someone Else Silver badge

      Re: 3 9s....

      Maybe that would be 3 Neins:

      You want it to work? Nein!

      You want it to behave consistently? Nein!

      You want to be recompensed for your testing, and fiddling with it to make it work? Nein!

    3. fidodogbreath

      Re: 3 9s....

      Still think Office 365 is false advertising...

      No; the service level guarantee refers to their billing, which is always for the full 365 days.

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Meh

        Re: 3 9s....

        Remember the bad old days, where you bought software and installed it yourself and that was that until you decided to upgrade it? And any outages were your own responsibility and within your own control?

        Gosh, however did we manage?

        1. Jakester

          Re: 3 9s....

          I was fed up with Microsoft Office bugs for decades as a PC support tech. At home, I used Star Office, when it was a commercial product and after it was acquired by Sun Microsystems. I quit upgrading when Oracle acquired it When Libre Office forked from the Star Office/Open Office development, I have been using that for all my spreadsheet and document writing. So far, I have had at least 99.99999% availability. Plus, I don't have to mess with any billing, registration, activation issues.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: 3 9s....

      9.99% uptime with no Service Health Advisories would be an improvement.

      Or maybe MS could stop constantly fucking with the back-end stuff that they are renting to the rest of us, and just Leave It Be for a couple of years. Holy hell, moving to Office365 was a stupid idea...

    5. Binraider Silver badge

      Re: 3 9s....

      Office 262 did improve a bit, but it’s certainly not 365. I’d say maybe 340 or so at the moment based on recent experience on corporate supplied junk laptop.

      No downtime on my standalone libreoffice installation. And copy of the install medium in the backup archive also.

      Obsession with particular vendors has to go, especially those that resort to subscriptions

  5. AnotherName
    Devil

    At last - the truth

    'designed to improve user experience'

    It certainly did that.

    1. MiguelC Silver badge
      Pint

      Re: At last - the truth

      While waiting for MS to clean up the mess, have one of those -->

      A much better user experience than using Office 3xx (going down almost daily, not even the 6 is safe)

  6. Huw L-D

    Of all the days, today was the wrong day to cut down on the smokes

    1. TRT Silver badge

      But was it Johnny Henshaw-Jacobs who pulled the big plug in Microsoft's datacenter?

      1. fidodogbreath

        "Just kidding! Haha!"

        1. David 132 Silver badge

          "There's a problem in our datacenter."

          "Our datacenter? What is it?"

          "It's a big building with servers, but that's not important right now..."

          1. TRT Silver badge

            Dude 1: "public class Main {"

            Dude 2: " public static void main( String[] args) {"

            Dude 1: "int i = 0; do { System.out.println(i);"

            Dude 2: " i++; } while (i < 5); "

            Dude 1: " }}"

            Stewardess: "I'm sorry! I just can't understand what you're saying!"

            Little old lady: "Excuse me, Miss. I might be able to help. I speak Java."

            1. David 132 Silver badge

              To all the enthusiastic, loyal Microsoft customers who voluntarily use Azure out there...

              "I just want to tell you both, good luck. We're all counting on you."

              1. Fred Daggy Silver badge

                I picked the wrong day to quit writing code!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Devil

    From DevOps to DevOooooooops!

    And from Azure to out in the blue...

  8. Stuart Castle Silver badge

    Interesting way to "improve" the user experience, by removing it..

    1. Someone Else Silver badge

      I dunno...not having to deal with a Microsoft beta release product for a day would certainly improve my "user experience"....

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I would call not dealing with a Microsoft interface for the day an improvement on the normal workday experience! :)

  10. ihardiman

    evangelist

    If O365 wasn't such great value I would be angry!

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: evangelist

      The sarcasm is strong in this one!

  11. AlanSh

    Oh why are we waiting (sung in a very loud voice)

    It's still f'in down. I have tasks queuing up!!!!

  12. 43300 Silver badge

    Still fucked. Just getting a timeout message at the moment.

  13. Ali Dodd

    Main Admin portal is affected but most of the individual portals are not. Here's a handy list of the others if you are tearing your hair out:

    https://msportals.io/?search=

    Hope it comes back soon but have found out can do most tasks in the others..

    1. Huw L-D

      Yup. Saved a project.

  14. Ken Moorhouse Silver badge

    If it ain't broke...

    They managed to leave out the "don't".

  15. GlenP Silver badge

    Seems to finally back up and running so I was able to do the very minor job I needed to do.

  16. D@v3

    i've enjoyed the opportunity

    to explain to the management that this is what can happen when you rely on cloud systems.

    Was a bit of a pain too.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: i've enjoyed the opportunity

      Was a bit of a pain too.

      You should not have used Powerpoint for it then.

      :)

      1. David 132 Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: i've enjoyed the opportunity

        You're right. When explaining things to Management one should always use Fuzzy-Felt, or possibly Play-Doh.

  17. Missing Semicolon Silver badge
    FAIL

    well done msft

    You just proved why businesses that need uptime go with AWS.

  18. ecofeco Silver badge

    I never tired of say it

    So how's that cloud thing working for ya?

  19. Bartholomew
    Coat

    Microsoft <insert missing word later>

    Now available as a service ?

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Microsoft <insert missing word later>

      Fail As A Service.

  20. Potemkine! Silver badge

    May be time to rename MS's quality department the Woops! one.

  21. arachnoid2
    Mushroom

    Dads Army

    Is Copropral Jones working for Microsoft as the shout " Dont panic!" goes up and another invention to attack the enemy with goes wrong.

    1. David 132 Silver badge

      Re: Dads Army

      "They don't like it up 'em sir, they don't."

  22. herman

    The last MS quality manager was Bill Gates and he wasn’t any good at it either, but it looks like once in a while people do miss him.

  23. ICL1900-G3

    Why...

    ... Do people put themselves through this misery? Alternatives are available.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Why...

      Consultants told them who, of course, have zero conflict of interest in this as they'll be billing time again later to fix all the problems..

      1. Kevin Johnston

        Re: Why...

        Plus, since the idiom of 'Nobody got fired for buying IBM' when south Microsoft was the next safe bet for Management with much the same results

  24. dboyes

    Don't the UK contingent have some laws about "fit for purpose"?

    Something I've never completely understood: isn't there a provision in UK law about products and services being "fit for purpose"? IANAL, but this would definitely seem to be a demonstrable failure to deliver on "fit for purpose". Can someone elaborate on that?

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Don't the UK contingent have some laws about "fit for purpose"?

      They also use language like "the product should perform as expected."

      So when it comes to Microsoft...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Don't the UK contingent have some laws about "fit for purpose"?

        But it does perform entirely as expected!

  25. ITMA Silver badge
    Devil

    Oh what a f**k up....

    Now here is a question - how the hell did this "update" get through Change Management?

    Any answers from your side Microsoft?

    You DO do proper change management.... DON'T YOU???

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