Microsoft is unable to run a reliable hosted email service, given infinite resources. What people don't realise is that the former is in part a consequence of the latter. Without a forcing function, complexity multiplies, silent fragility accumulates, end-to-end understanding dwindles. There is no incentive to simplify.
Seriously, who will change provider because of this? Our institution is so brainwashed and hidebound to Microsoft it would take a lot more than this. It seems like an abusive relationship: the bad times just increase fear generally, so make change less likely.
It's the same with AWS, Cloudflare. There is also this weird effect, often commented on here, where if half the Internet is down, everyone understands when you are down. If I use some random new start up for my infrastructure or services, and it goes down, customers and executives are furious. So it seems we are stuck here.
Apparently this single outage means Office 365 uptime this year drops to 3 nines (2 nines for this month). You can claim SLA credit worth 50% service fee by applying before December 31.
I am certain this is the direction of thought at least for Europeans. IIRC France recently moved away from Microsoft. If right now they do not have this outage, I can only imagine how much it boosts confidence in such decisions
When your most important contacts use outlook, it does not matter what you do. Sending and receiving email when almost nobody else is sending and receiving is only small help.
Some problems are not solved by individual choice. If 30-40% of your important contacts use service that is down, your ability to work goes down dramatically.
I have currently important 3 daily contacts down they use MS services extensively contacted and said they can't do much of anything because their work process and the process of their contacts is down.
There probably are some very good reasons not to self host your email server but apparently my own, self hosted, email server's uptime over the last decade is now better than that of outlook.com :-D
Quick lets collect all options people have to self host! in addition to docker-mailserver im aware of
How many Microsoft employees are working on this? It's concerning that one of the biggest, most valuable companies on the planet, that runs services internationally, can have one of its primary services have gone down for this long.
6 hours ago they seemed to not exactly understand what the problem was, and that was 6 hours into the outage.
Not so long ago, I was assigned to a project that had to be built on Azure due to client requirements. Because we were underhanded and it was an MVP, we'd elected to use PaaS as much as possible: Postgres Flexible Server, Static Web Apps, Easy Auth, etc. On paper, these all looked fine. They had lots of documentation, example projects, GitHub repos, blogs, roadmaps, etc. Then we started building and running into issues, and we realised a bunch of these offerings were basically unmaintained. There were features that had been stuck in "preview" status for literally years. The blogs and roadmaps were no longer updated, and issues were piling up in GitHub.
I started digging into the historical blog posts, GitHub comments, etc. and I realised everybody at MS who'd been working on them, SWEs, PMs, architects, etc. had either left the company, or moved to other teams. And the one constant about the internal moves was that people were now working in some "AI" related project or product. Literally, I didn't find a single person who wasn't now working on AI.
Clearly, there has been a huge internal push to get into AI. Resources have been reallocated, and anything non-AI related has been starved. And since working on an AI project is probably considered the only route to advancing your career, anybody with any ambition has moved to a team doing something AI-related. The result is that huge numbers of products and teams doing vital but non-AI related work have been hollowed out, and now we're seeing the consequences.
Let me put this way, the Visual C++ standard library has officially one FTE working on it, everything else are open source contributions.
WinUI 3.0, WinAppSDK, and related CsWinRT, C++/WinRT are in a ridiculous position six years after Project Reunion announcement, due to ever meagre resources.
XBox app keeps under delivering user experience, and bugs on patch Tuesdays are getting a joke by now.
Maybe acting like jerk-offs got them to four trillion but there are consequences to burning all your social capital. A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft, I would bet that this affects the quality of talent they can hire and these are downstream affects.
Lately it seems like more non-techies are souring on the company.
>A large camp of software developers have genuinely hostile feelings towards Microsoft
which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.
they've still been hiring, just on an attritional basis - headcount has remained flat for a few yrs now. it is pretty clear though that they want to operate even leaner.
Jerk-offs can skim the profit of going big yesterday while the consequences affect everyone, but only in the future of yesterday. Who does such things, one might ask? Jerk-offs, off course. And PE too (likely not a disjoint set).
Was there ever a time when this was not true? M$ was always among top hated companies since 90s, arrogance, fuck-U to users all around, absolutely ignoring any standards larger than them, and famous 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish' which was pathetic to watch for any engineer worth 2 cents.
Top notch user experience peak was Windows XP and every subsequent release was massively larger, clunkier and slower while requiring way more resources, was spying on the users more and more. Office has similar story, peak of usability was maybe 2007 with ribbon introduction (which still a lot of power users hated with passion since it was far from clean design, more seemingly designed by committee of marketing guys).
This is what I don't get about big companies and their software; you'd think every application, every moving part would have a (small?) team of core maintainers, people that get paid well to know everything there is to know about something, ranging from (in microsoft's case) Paint to a particular configuration panel.
I get that this doesn't scale though - a lot of features are just "done" at some point and keeping one or more people whose sole job is to maintain this may lead to them bolting on features just to stay relevant / stop being bored. But big tech can easily afford to keep people like that on.
(I mean they keep (kept?) tons of middle management on, who knows what they even do? Not emailing right now that's for sure am I right?)
"Too expensive" as measured by bean counters that don't understand the actual risk profile - or do understand it but have such a short window of strategic concern it leads to this. It would be an interesting analysis to stack up costs to Msoft vs cost of labor cut as this outage evolves.
It may not be true now but 10 years down the line? This is disaster in the making yet while most people recognize that (when filtering out most fanatical pro-ai folks claiming everywhere how they get 10x or 100x work done) nobody is able to do anything. Sort of legacy technical debt being delivered but of different kind than usual, that train that will hit you since you stand on the rail line yet its moving 5kmh and you see it from 200m, but unable or unwilling to move away (Austin powers scene with steamroller does it better than me [1]).
Imagine if say BMW decided they don't want to manufacture their motors, suspensions, drivetrain etc. Outsourcing 100% of that knowledge to external suppliers, for all models, from now on forever. How do you think market would reacted to such move ie by valuation of stocks?
Alas, Teams are working, or at least the chat and voice call portions of it. So managers are in a calling and chatting frenzy right now, pulling every body else in.
/s Their internal AI is full steam on it. The issue is just that their internal AI infrastructure is down too, so AI just need to fix itself first. Then it will focus on fixing the issue. Oh, wait...
Was he? I struggle to see it even in hindsight, and definitely his moves were bunch of FU to common users. Maybe in some specific area you care about, but not their core products like windows and office
Something I've been thinking about with the last few major outages is that as there is more and more consolidation (fewer large companies running a higher share of the world's infrastructure and critical services) is that we become increasingly exposed to massive disruption like this. Would some sort of mandated maximum occupancy per instance resolve this? So Outlook.com is allowed to support 100m accounts per instance. Then you are required to spin up Outlook2.com. You are not allowed to have any shared infrastructure. Yes it's wasteful and expensive, but these are companies with billions in revenue, so that's the price you pay. It just seems that keeping these huge, incredibly complex services running is turning in to an impossible task. Very much a hot take so interested in the opinions of peope who have worked at this scale.
I have always felt it's less about email redundancy and more about having a backup plan. If outlook goes down tomorrow, does everyone know how to keep work and client communication moving? that is something worth thinking about.
"Okay? Nothing. It’s just terrible. Every day is a nightmare. As recently as 1972, most buildings collapsed and rusty nails were found in cereal boxes all the time. Okay, so when you’re faced with statistics like this, it’s very difficult to be optimistic. So, hey, why not think about the statistics? I want to just put that out of your mind."
Outside of tech and disaster recovery, people _really_ don't understand that some redundancy--in this context--is a good thing.
The idea of paying for a backup system, or even having one on standby for situations like this is just not on people's minds, or if it is, it's simply not affordable because it would cost you too much compared to your competition.
Razor thin margins and generally getting away with it is what makes this work. Until it doesn't.
I don't see a reasonable alternative here. Pay for another email/office suite provider, and duplicate all mails and files? Twice the cost and exposure surface just to cover 0.01% of downtime.
Sure, it makes sense for mission critical companies (utilities, emergency services), but I don't think it does for an average company. Especially that you don't take much blame if everyone is down.
The difference between a distributed system and a monolith is that in a monolith you have some idea what your single point of failure is, but in a distributed system you don't know your dozen single points of failure until they happen in production.
Having friends who work at Microsoft, this is not really surprising at all. The company has always had deep structural problems. The AI change has really just exposed it and is aggressively accelerating the inevitable implosion. It's truly in a free fall that is planned and orchestrated perfectly by their upper management. Their CEO and VPs are convinced you don't need engineering know-hows any more because of AI, and they got all the management layers to sincerely agree with them. Not in a malicious or subverting way, but in a "you can't get a man to understand something his salary depends on him not understanding it" way.
Microsoft has a moat, but their moat is having billions of dollars to spend on data centers. It's a failure everywhere else. It'll continue to rake in billions in revenue because people need compute now, but it's rotten at the top.
This is going to cause absolute chaos. Basically every government organisation and business in the UK runs on outlook. The whole day is going to be a write off. It’s like a bank holiday!
Just the UK? Lol, you can add many, if not most government and private companies and educational institutions in the US and countless other countries to that list. The government and corporate world is grinding to a halt.
Government I have no idea, but loads of businesses don't use Outlook - alternatives do exist. I've personally not used Outlook for well over a decade now.
Quick google AI mode check says:
- MS 365/Outlook: ~40%
- Google Workspace: ~25%
- Zoho: ~2%
And then a bunch of others - Rackspace, Zimbra, IBM WebSphere Lotus Notes Blue For Enterprise XML Watson Edition et al
It's much better UX if everyone within the company uses the same office suite/email, it makes collaboration much nicer when everything is well integrated. And people get used to one system.
My guess is that having duplicate system would cost (in money for double subscriptions and lost productivity) much more than the benefit of being available 0.01% more. Especially for universities where almost nothing is really urgent and can't be delayed by a day.
No one knows if this is AI related, but it's easy to imagine that where changes written by AI fail in production, if AI can't find the solution (which will be common as AI access to production systems is typically reduced), then the devs won't either, or at least it will take them some time.
Perhaps the velocity is the problem, not that AI inherently produces worse code (you just need one bad or just inexperienced engineer have their PR slip through to have bad human written code in you code base). When the velocity is high, there's less time to battle test each change and new code piles up on the old one. When the velocity is low, shitty code fails in production, but people are aware of what was recently changed and can find and fix the problems.
The bigger issue with having your systems written by AI, is that nobody knows how the system works anymore and can't pinpoint where the likely failure points are.
The status updates have a pretty strong "LLM-driven agent failing to debug a complex system" feel to them. I hope it's not the case, but I could imagine a scenario in which inexperienced engineers - or experienced ones who have lost touch with the codebase - are deferring to LLMs to drive the troubleshooting and fix here.
I do actually believe that LLMs and process around them will continue get better and become the accepted, but that there's going to be a 'fossil record' of a lot of problems having been seeded in these early years of AI that will take some time repair.
Alas, Teams is working, although parts of it which are integrated from other services are not, like calendar (exchange), or file sharing (share point).
Email is actually designed with intermittent connectivity in mind. The sending server buffers outgoing emails until they're accepted by the receiving server. Typical settings are to retry every 4 hours, with a permanent failure being counted after 3-7 days.
Their current engineers must have stored their KT notes from their laid off and leaving senior engineers in OneNote on their Mac, and might have been working with copilot to find the root cause /s
Do they lose any significant number of customers? Do anybody in leadership get fired?
Do reading the twitter status updates give you the impression of an organization that takes responsibility seriously?
Or do it sound more like an organization that is optimized for evaporating responsibility?
I think this will change nothing.
replaces all occurances of microsoft/office 365 with microsoft/office 362 (not in links, just in the visible text)
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microsoft-362...
Also, multiple bankers I'm speaking to about Anthropic's IPO can't send or receive work e-mails. So that's a thing.
BBC is running live coverage of it at the level of government and ministers, feels surreal
Barring corona & year end holidays, this is probably the closest we can get to a global work holiday.
This means you cannot do anything that requires email auth (OTP, signup etc)
I don't expect a fundamental shift but the boss having no access to his mails seems certainly like something I would bring up quite a bit.
https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/ https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
It is very easy to set up (just a bit of time on average every 6 month to follow upgrades) and work out of the box.
Europe outlook users are experiencing problems too.
Some problems are not solved by individual choice. If 30-40% of your important contacts use service that is down, your ability to work goes down dramatically.
I have currently important 3 daily contacts down they use MS services extensively contacted and said they can't do much of anything because their work process and the process of their contacts is down.
Quick lets collect all options people have to self host! in addition to docker-mailserver im aware of
- https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart
- https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized
6 hours ago they seemed to not exactly understand what the problem was, and that was 6 hours into the outage.
This is concerning.
I started digging into the historical blog posts, GitHub comments, etc. and I realised everybody at MS who'd been working on them, SWEs, PMs, architects, etc. had either left the company, or moved to other teams. And the one constant about the internal moves was that people were now working in some "AI" related project or product. Literally, I didn't find a single person who wasn't now working on AI.
Clearly, there has been a huge internal push to get into AI. Resources have been reallocated, and anything non-AI related has been starved. And since working on an AI project is probably considered the only route to advancing your career, anybody with any ambition has moved to a team doing something AI-related. The result is that huge numbers of products and teams doing vital but non-AI related work have been hollowed out, and now we're seeing the consequences.
WinUI 3.0, WinAppSDK, and related CsWinRT, C++/WinRT are in a ridiculous position six years after Project Reunion announcement, due to ever meagre resources.
XBox app keeps under delivering user experience, and bugs on patch Tuesdays are getting a joke by now.
All this in a four trillion valued company.
Lately it seems like more non-techies are souring on the company.
which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.
Top notch user experience peak was Windows XP and every subsequent release was massively larger, clunkier and slower while requiring way more resources, was spying on the users more and more. Office has similar story, peak of usability was maybe 2007 with ribbon introduction (which still a lot of power users hated with passion since it was far from clean design, more seemingly designed by committee of marketing guys).
I get that this doesn't scale though - a lot of features are just "done" at some point and keeping one or more people whose sole job is to maintain this may lead to them bolting on features just to stay relevant / stop being bored. But big tech can easily afford to keep people like that on.
(I mean they keep (kept?) tons of middle management on, who knows what they even do? Not emailing right now that's for sure am I right?)
One guy but it's Stephan T. Lavavej the guy who the "STL" was literally named after.
Imagine if say BMW decided they don't want to manufacture their motors, suspensions, drivetrain etc. Outsourcing 100% of that knowledge to external suppliers, for all models, from now on forever. How do you think market would reacted to such move ie by valuation of stocks?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_PrZ-J7D3k
all 3!
That’s why it’s taken over 12 hours now, no one’s left that knows without copilot’s help.
https://www.centennialsoftwaresolutions.com/help/transcript-...
I am looking at other current events and beginning to wonder if there is some kind of correlation.
We're doing anything to avoid single points of failure in our products, but our IT is doing the opposite.
The idea of paying for a backup system, or even having one on standby for situations like this is just not on people's minds, or if it is, it's simply not affordable because it would cost you too much compared to your competition.
Razor thin margins and generally getting away with it is what makes this work. Until it doesn't.
Sure, it makes sense for mission critical companies (utilities, emergency services), but I don't think it does for an average company. Especially that you don't take much blame if everyone is down.
Microsoft has a moat, but their moat is having billions of dollars to spend on data centers. It's a failure everywhere else. It'll continue to rake in billions in revenue because people need compute now, but it's rotten at the top.
The biggest issue has been so many security and approval flows depend on email, so all processes have ground to a halt.
Government I have no idea, but loads of businesses don't use Outlook - alternatives do exist. I've personally not used Outlook for well over a decade now.
Quick google AI mode check says:
- MS 365/Outlook: ~40%
- Google Workspace: ~25%
- Zoho: ~2%
And then a bunch of others - Rackspace, Zimbra, IBM WebSphere Lotus Notes Blue For Enterprise XML Watson Edition et al
MY University's whole email system is Outlook/365, and that also seems kind of dumb to me.
My guess is that having duplicate system would cost (in money for double subscriptions and lost productivity) much more than the benefit of being available 0.01% more. Especially for universities where almost nothing is really urgent and can't be delayed by a day.
It's just a wild theory, but maybe there are still too much employees left, standing in the way of AI? I would try firing another 60,000 first.
What could go wrong, said all of the hyperscalers. Enjoy your multi day downtimes.
I love this kind of wording. It makes everything suddenly more serious lol.
No Outlook, they should make this a public holiday!
Isn't there an old saying about putting all one's eggs into one basket?
It would not surprise me if the entire project is complete and utter (human-written) slop