OneDrive back on its feet, but ongoing Skype credit problem hasn't gone away An issue with payments and credits for Skype subscribers remains ongoing, days after The Register was first informed by readers that it was broken. It wasn't the only breaking change for Microsofties in the New Year, after the team on Monday rolled back a "recently enabled" tweak "within a specific app responsible for …
The first thing MS did after acquiring Skype was change it from using a peer-to-peer protocol to using a centralized protocol where everything is funnelled through MS' servers for data-snooping purposes.
Then MS began adding cute. useless features while failing to maintain basic functionality. (Regression testing, anyone? Anyone? I guess the MS interns assigned to Skype aren't being given wise, adult supervision.)
Last weekend, some friends and I (one Windows desktop, one Mac laptop, one Linux laptop) tried conferencing by Skype and could not get fully-connected. We gave up and used Discord, which worked just fine.
It was going into the crapper before that. I tried to make a call from a foreign country because that's exactly what people used Skype for. Skype locked my account "for security" and wouldn't unlock it until I gave them my original credit card number. That was an old card I no longer had. I said if Skype wanted to keep my money so !@#$ safe, they need to close the account and send a check to the address in the account.
I think Microsoft unlocked the account but the Skype client was hopeless at that point.
OneDrive, like any cloud-storage provider, isn't the problem. The problem is setting up anything in a such way that it assumes the cloud will always be there when you need it. For me, it's just an (additional) off-site backup: if it goes down, I just keep working from local storage until the problem is resolved.
Paying extra isn't a guarantee. Being a large percentage of a cloud provider's income is your guarantee. You have to be big enough to cause pain when you are unhappy with the service provided. And if you are that big, why are you not hosting your own cloud and keeping the profit?
"OneDrive, like any cloud-storage provider, isn't the problem"
Um, except when it *is*. In the early days of Windows 10, the OneDrive client had a particularly irksome bug where the OneDrive client for reasons that were unclear and never fully explained took it upon itself to delete swathes of files from the cloud rather than initially sync'ing them to a newly upgraded/installed WIndows 10 machine.
I'm still wondering if the various outages are related to MS being too trigger-happy at disabling Basic Auth across their empire. As I understand it, they had set a deadline of November at which time they were definitely, absolutely going to start disabling it in Office365. (unless you went through some silly wizard and requested they turn it back on temporarily). That's roughly the same time frame in which these mystery outages started happening. Could just be a coincidence of timing with bad code updates, or could be they're unknowingly torching their services from within in their glittery-eyed zeal to make life suck a little more for us admins.
the name Cloud is far too clean for what it is. It invokes pictures of white castles in the sky unassailable by mere mortals
when the truth is closer to
Dodgy Dave's lockup down the road with security cameras that worked at some point, the fire exit propped open for ventilation and some bloke saying your data will be safe if you pay them $ExhorbitantAmount, making it apparent if you don't it definitely won't be.
I prefer the acronym OPT (other peoples tin)
Depends on where you are and where your are calling to. From some countries Vodafone would like to charge me two or three euros per minute. If you need to call someone for whom you can't use some kind of app the ability of Skype of being able to call plain telephone numbers is very useful.
"The Skype for Business product – once used by such venerables as particle accelerator boffins at CERN, which swapped it with softphone client CERNphone in June – was replaced by Teams in 2019 and reached end-of-life last year."
Errr, the author has conflated SfB with SfB Online.
SfB Online was retired back in 2019 in favour of Teams. But SfB as an onprem or hosted solution is still very much a thing and supported by M$.
Yesterday I spent 40 minutes on the chat with Microsoft support. They provided me the link to (re) activate Skype since it was no longer linked to my Office365 subscription. It DIDN'T work on ANY browser--multiple redirects and then stopped. It didn't work on Chrome, Safari on Mac or iPad. It only worked when i tried it on my mobile! In the end, Microsoft gave me a $2 credit!!
Given that this was a known problem, they could have instantly refunded me the call charges in December/January since they have access to call records. they could have given an automatic credit to everyone who made calls during the time period. It would have been much cheaper than tying up customer support and wasting the time of customers. It also would have built huge amount of goodwill.
A big missed opportunity all within its control!
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