Ex-MSFT here, sharing my outdated POV based on working on a product that was using Microsoft Exchange and therefore was hooked onto the email delivery pipeline.
Note that the infra for M365, Azure etc is different. They would be running on servers hosted in MSFT DCs but have completely different CI/CD pipelines. M365 services have their own deployment pipelines and it takes on the order of weeks to deploy your changes to production.
Considering the fact that Outlook is down, clearly email doesn’t seem to be working. So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it to run the cloud version hereby called M365. Email is one big “macro-service”, if you’re running Windows Server, look at the process called “EdgeTransport.exe” this is responsible for sending/receiving email on Windows Servers. There are probably multiple 100s of services supported by 100s of teams that are run while email is routed from sender to receiver via MSFT Exchange servers. My recollection is that even if one of these services goes down or introduces latency in the pipeline, it caused a major incident. When I was working in M365 Security in 2024, this Exchange Server pipeline was called “legacy” because it’s one big .NET Framework service. I don’t know if they upgraded to .NET core but developing on this was as HN comments say, very janky.
The reason Teams doesn’t seem to be down is that Teams services are completely different and are written using .NET Core and have their own separate release pipeline. It was much easier to interact with Teams services. I actually worked closely with the team that was responsible for ingesting Teams messages to the customer’s data store. Their code base was much more modern and easy to understand. Exchange Server not so much.
I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
To test our code changes, we would check out a VM that was running Microsoft Windows Server edition which was a beefy VM that was running Exchange. It was a carbon copy of the server running in production.
The Exchange code base frankly was a behemoth. No one had a full understanding of how it worked E2E. I am just sharing how I understood it. I was only a lowly L63 btw.
> The hierglyphics on the left of the dialog box are supposed to distract someone who is peering over your shoulder trying to learn your password as you type.
lmao... but is it actually random or is it a hash of your password to make sure you typed it correctly?
If was like this because it was designed before networks were expected to be fully connected at any one time. Mail would hop its way towards its destination as intermediate nodes dialed in over modem to upstreams.
Think about it in context. Polling constantly would consume a non-trivial amount of both bandwidth and server resources. 15 second intervals would require 60 times as many very expensive servers to handle a certain number of users as 15 minutes would.
And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.
Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.
This seemed a little hard to believe but it sounded like it was more of a replication where it was downloading things into an offline mode where you then write your emails and send them back again period. Other email clients might do this as well if you're running it on your desktop.
It’s interesting how relative this is, reading by the comments and stories around them. A previous coworker started computing in the punch card era and would tell stories of dropping your stack of cards and having to reorder them, using the printouts to debug, and so on. And helping develop what’s now known as fork() for processes (although it predated fork and he had his own name for it), and helping develop a commercial RDBMS before they existed all in a non tech industry career.
So when I read about Exchange Server to me it still feels quite modern.
My father has told some stories about waiting in line to run punch card programs and people dropping their stack and becoming flustered about it. They're funny to hear and mentioning it because this is the first I've ever heard it mentioned elsewhere.
I doubt it has something to do with being old, running an email server of any kind, let alone knowing how email works, let alone using email, have been all various abstractions to help make users into consumers who pay more than people who know how to build and run this infrastructure.
If it takes weeks to get some code into production, I understand how AI can enormously speed up things. Yes, AI can be fantastic but if people claim 100x increase, something else is majorly fubar.
"Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted.
Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels."
Ok but why would all infra would go down everywhere, at the same time? Is it all a big server? Are there any Architects left or is it all Golf Players?
Microsoft product reliability has been a running joke since the company started launching products. Why would anything change just because they pivoted to managed services instead of shipping install media?
It’s a distributed system with thousands of servers with automatic update distribution and config change distribution. Bad changes can propagate across the entire system though Microsoft status updates say they didn’t see any change that seemed relevant. It could also be a bug across all the uniform code that somehow triggered. For example Cisco BE servers once had a firmware bug that after 32767 hours the fans would all run at 100% speed.
This hasn't been the case for a long time. Unfortunately there are micro services that can still bring down the system if there's a bad enough bug. That's not supposed to be able to happen as updates roll out over a period of time. Unfortunately you can still get bit if another update creates a bug that takes out instances faster than they can be recreated.
All the MS memes today made me realize people still use Outlook?
I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s.
In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does. Who are these companies that still use it?
Many, many big companies do, and some universities also moved to MS365 when Google downgraded their free campus agreement, because they were already paying for MS365 for Office and that came with cloud storage and outlook.
It's not about outlook the mailing app. They called their SaaS e-mail Outlook, you can use it without using Windows, in the same way as Gmail. Pretty popular in the corporate world
Sounds like you live in the Silicon Valley bubble. I don’t have a stat but I would wager that most businesses (especially larger ones) run on outlook/exchange.
You have probably mostly worked for tech companies where business employees were not the primary workforce. When you think about it most other business generally have everyone needing a word, excel or PowerPoint. It bundles cleanly with the whole package.
A large majority of companies I've worked for over the last 30+ years used Outlook and Exchange Server, or now M$365, for email, even in those cases when my actual work was on Linux. The exception were those that used Gmail...
> I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s. [...] In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does.
Yes, then you probably at least work in a bubble.
In my experience, it's more common than GSuite in most companies outside of startups and big tech and is ubiquitous at schools, among many, many other entities.
I’ve worked at 2 companies who used Google for email and calendaring but still relied on O365 (one of the many naming incarnations) for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft really do have quite a mindshare foothold in the office productivity market.
Last big corp I worked for had a half-half setup of Outlook for email (and you were reminded that messages are retained for 7 years) and used Zoom+Slack instead of Teams (it was disabled, so not even an option), but we did use Sharepoint.
I’m with you. I took a job in finance at one point, reporting to the CTO. On the first day they showed me my desk, a windows machine. I had not used it since high school, and not seriously then. It just never occurred to me that you would have engineers use windows (all the trading systems were Linux).
The CTO had to pull a bunch of strings to let me run Linux.
What is driving me nuts is that we still heavily rely on email. Even to the point were we are unable to get notifications other than that.
I work at a fortune 500 company and they got me, 3 hours after I started working , the basic info about the obvious the internet is already screaming at you.
Since we are responsible for a large web application I tried to reach out to people through VIVA (yes, we only make use of that) and we managed only to reach about 2-3% of the user base. Information-wise it's like a blackout. For living in 2026 this is completely unacceptable.
Yeah I don’t think anyone wanted that, we just ended up this way because it makes spam control more convenient. Without spam, email is incredibly simple to self-host. I suspect it may have ended up one of the most common services for companies to self-host.
What’s worse is how many things force an email second factor now. No choice to make a TOTP or to use a passkey (which, with biometrics securing it, is two friggin factors at once, and should be all we need for anything that isn’t nuclear secrets!!!! Sorry this just kills me with every SaaS product I have to “two-factor” to daily).
Your email is down? Cool now you can’t log into anything.
Meanwhile we were very happy that we mainly rely on email. We were still able to send out urgent messages (like "sorry if we don't reply, Microsoft is down, you can reach us by [phone] or [backup email]") via SMTP and if we really needed to receive some email, we'd be able to set up a secondary MX record to a holding server in about an hour.
If we were mainly using Teams or whatever other "better than email" service and that had an outage, we'd actually be in the dark!
As the resident complainer about Microsoft lock-in, I was honestly quite surprised by how well we could work around this. Don't get me wrong, if it was Entra that fell over, we'd be thoroughly fucked, but Exchange wasn't all that bad.
> So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it ...
On-premises Exchange is still supported and licensed. It's a subscription instead of a perpetual license.
> I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
Exchange is a mature product (albeit not without its flaws). Its era of change was between its 2007 and 2013 versions (inclusive) when it was made more modular and many parts were ported to the .NET runtime. The 2016, 2019, and now Subscription Edition codebases were more of an evolution and has much less churn.
Microsoft will still charge you money for Exchange SE, and occasionally release security and other bug fixes, but “supported” is an extremely generous description of the state of the product.
The difference with their other products is that they generally want you to adopt it, and they actually do feature development, neither of which are true for Exchange SE.
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
In maintenance, sometimes the dumb solution is the best. The servers that ran amazon.com had a memory leak and were subsequently restarted. This hack continues for years because it was the most cost-effective thing to do.
Put another way, if they didn’t turn it off and on again, I would think less of them because that’s the first thing you should always do unless you know better
Yeah, a place I worked at years ago had a cron job to restart some critical service at midnight because it leaked memory all day. That was there for years.
Another real world example: to this day, it's a good idea to limit requests per PHP process using the MaxRequestsPerChild(apache)/max_requests(php-fpm) config option to some sane limit. After that configured number of requests, the PHP worker is terminated and restarted to... "fix" memory leaks. I remember setting that in the late 90s on Apache...
I've used PHP in two previous jobs and certainly the stuff that I was in control of had it set to 0 because we made sure we didn't leak memory. Other departments... I'm sure at least one had the limit set to something non-zero.
We had a mail server that ran on an old DEC minicomputer. I rebooted it every six months because it had a slow memory, or possibly resource, leak somewhere.
It was the only thing running on that box so it wasn't a big deal to reboot.
I worked on multi-million dollar airplanes. If a pilot called me with an issue and hadn't rebooted the plane (on the ground), I wouldn't even talk to them. Rebooting isn't always a bad solution to technology.
It's not a bad solution, it definitely should be tried. But I'm still rather shocked to see it in official notes, especially this "late" in the timeline.
> it’s a work around until a more permanent fix can be deployed.
If it "fixes" your problem, then you didn't fix you problem you identified it. It's another symptom of a bloated industry that can't or won't innovate, and I think it's more "won't" than "can't."
For example, we still can't patch running Windows, and most of the information technology professionals I know are still convinced it's impossible. Billions upon billions of dollars in time have been lost, probably enough man hours to send men to mars several times over.
Yet, you can just buy a version of Windows Server that already does it. It's not only possible, they already have the code. They just don't care enough to integrated it into the product most people use.
If they rebooted it, and it started working again, would you just walk away? Or would you try to figure out why the fuck it needed to be rebooted in the first place?
Thales or Collins or Honeywell or whoever provided the system would. The technician at the airport would only follow a procedure listed on a checklist, which probably includes rebooting the system.
Ironically there have been a fair few cases of aircraft incidents where components were reported as bad by pilots but the issue couldn't be reproduced on the ground and "it worked" after a reboot and self-test so they just kept using it (with this cycle repeating multiple times). Often there were clear physical problems (cracked solder joints, stuck microswitches, broken insulation) that were only discovered after a catastrophic failure but could've been discovered with a more inquisitive engineering culture.
I would argue a "just reboot it" culture leads to more problems -- engineers should be empowered to diagnose problems before they become catastrophic. In the world of software we even have mechanisms for extracting data from failed systems to root cause them later, and yet most people do not take that step before "just reboot[ing] it".
[1]: AirAsia 8501, Lauda Air 004, and SmartLynx Estonia 9001 come to mind.
Right, rebooting only really makes sense if you understand why the reboot is going to fix the problem. As in, corrupted volatile state is reasonably fixed with a reboot. Any hardware issues or persistent state problems could well get worse.
But these intermittent failures lead to delays and worse. The sheer cost of repeat events leads to action. If deferrable at all the standard troubleshooting is mostly remove and replace. The repair and reliability processes identify these rogue units fairly fast and the actual rates of that in a well functioning airline are very low.
Yes, I remember a flight that sat at the gate past departure time, the explanation to the passengers was that some essential piece of equipment wasn't functioning, they had tried restarting it, and it was going to be replaced. About 30 minutes late, we were on our way.
The vast majority of the problems were a system that missed the time window to report it's self test. A reboot got things in order.
It was a small fleet, so we had a pretty good idea if the same problem kept popping up so we could look more into that system.
A few fault codes were well known enough that if you called with that one the answer was to shut down and find a hotel, you aren't going anywhere and no reboot will take care of it. (bad detectors in the engines for about 10 years until a redesign)
What makes sense for something that is used for 20 hours at a time is different from what makes sense for a service that literally has "365" in its name.
Powercycling is a designed method to bailout Cisco routers. If you botch a configuration command and lose connection, you can have someone powercycle it to restore you last good configuration. Its not just a joke it really works more often than I'd like to admit.
~25 years ago I was a firewall administrator, and the Cisco PIX we used was notorious for gradually running out of memory, effectively cutting off the entire company from the Internet when it went down (and it was a very big company).
We absolutely should have scheduled reboots during off hours. Lessons learned.
copilot, make this doom and gloom situation sound better. assume you're using the voice of a friendly but intensely focused sysadmin. use only neutral language.
So the servers are ok but many of the health checks are failing and so the servers are taken off rotation, increasing load on other servers. I'm sure it's more complicated than it seems but from my POV this looks like amateur hour at Microsoft.
I'm not thrilled with what they've done to Windows lately myself, but this is just rude.
You know a lot of talented people who work there also post here, and it's not fair to insinuate that they aren't talented because some vastly complex system somewhere in the world had a bad day.
Stuff happens, things break. That's why lots of nines cost a lot of money. It doesn't automatically mean that anyone is incompetent.
Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
That’s purely a choice by those claiming the nines. I’ve worked in companies selling software with more than 6 nines uptime (so that we can be more confident about the 5 nines). Not 4 nines uptime plus some money back for the other one.
Individual talent is irrelevant when you have a company culture that rewards the opposite of that. Any talented person working at Microsoft knows that they are dealing with structural problem that force MS products to be massive piles of shit. There isn't much an talented individual can do about that.
An organization can become fundamentally opposed to the purpose for which it was created. Organizations simply don't follow the same laws as the individuals inside it do. A company can be made of geniuses and be totally ineffective; it can be full of talented go-getters and be completely unable to fix problems.
To be fair: I want the people who can speak most competently to a problem to be working on it versus writing commentary. Those highly-technical people can shine in the postmortem report.
I disagree; the communication aspects - including external - are a hugely important part of any incident response. IME the biggest challenges in these situations are the many levels & combinations of communication and coordination. You don't need your best DevOps person doing it, but there should be plenty of competent technical product managers or engineering managers who could do this well.
And how do those product or engineering managers get information on what’s being tried and what is being discovered without slowing down the process of fixing the issue?
Microsoft is not a small startup where the CTO is getting pulled into firefighting.
They should have established procedures for large-scale events, and they must include a coordinator whose entire job is to manage the external and internal communication.
And that is a good thing. Well, maybe not good. But the last thing you need in a crisis is to pull people away from fixing the problem and make them type up status updates. Admittedly, having tech knowledge would help the writers - a technical incident management team would be better. But ain't nothing wrong with letting the PR folks write up words while the tech folk work on problem solving.
Amateur hour? Not sure if you've lived through one of these cascading failures, but they are hard to design against, hard to load/chaos test for, and hard to recover from. The key is that this is a dynamic load, not a static load; and it's normally amplified by uncontrolled retry behavior by clients.
In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
Many of us insist upon not building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about precisely for this reason.
Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
There are methods for building complex systems our of smaller pieces. Humanity has done this forever. An internal combustion engine is very complex. An airplane is very complex. You put a boundary around your system, you build it to a spec, you test it to a spec, you define the behaviour across anything you can see. When two engines fail on the airplane it can maybe still at least glide. Maybe there's an ejection seat. Because someone is doing the system thinking with some level of discipline.
A brick is very complex. A bearing is complex. A bolt and a nut and a washer are complex. An integrated circuit is complex. We build stuff out of that. Like buildings that don't fall when you sneeze on them.
In software we use duct tape - at best. But that's not just Microsoft, that's pretty much everyone. With maybe few exceptions.
Software systems are by nature more complex than physical systems. They also lack any tangible interfaces beyond code and diagrams and collective knowledge in the minds of the humans who build and maintain them.. The rapid evolution of software is no help either..if anything AI is accelerating that rapidity as well.
Except for the fact that it seems like most Microsoft outages are self owns. I'm not sure how many times we've had outages due to bad deployments that somehow made it to their global infrastructure and only got noticed when customers notified.
Plenty of internal accounts from previous employees highlight this.
To be fair to Microsoft (and I'm having trouble believing I just wrote that), the vast majority of everybody's outages are "self owns". If you don't change anything, you're not going to break anything, and major external events (fires, cable cuts etc) are rare and can usually be worked around.
I have lived through and debugged cascading failures and large scale distributed systems.
The problem is amateur hour is the entire industry. Nobody specs anything, nobody tests overload conditions, nobody thinks failure modes. The stuff that every engineer does when building anything else other than software doesn't happen. The orgs are bloated. Too many teams. Too many silos. Incentives are stacked the wrong way. People are motivated to not think about systems but stay in their lane. Responsibilities are split in weird ways.
Yes. Big systems are hard. But we can build, manage and understand big systems with the right approach and people. Even one computer is complicated and many people get stuck trying to debug a piece of software running on one machine. At the end of the day it's not magic. All of humanity is big systems but when I have a power failure the power company is generally able to understand why and resolve it and the water in my tap doesn't stop flowing and the cell towers still work (generators, who would have thunk).
A friend who is really good had to leave Microsoft because of how AI was pushed. Before that he was telling me some other stories that make the culture seem pretty not great. Heard similar stories from other people. It used to be a great place filled with great people until at some point it's just another big company.
I'll be the downvoted comment, since HN doesn't like to hear this, but the other flavors of engineering do stuff we don't because they're regulated.
My bet is we'll eventually get there. Planes kill people when they fall, software used to not be as dangerous, but it's been a while since it became critical infrastructure.
Given that people on reddit claimed that in the entirety of New Zealand no real estate transactions can be settled, causing cascading failures [1]...
I think this might actually be the incident pushing governments to designate large online services such as MS 365, Gmail et al as critical infrastructure and force companies to massive, yet-unseen levels of transparency and regulation.
The EU is already itching to act ever since the Trump admin forced US Big Tech to terminate service to the ICC judges, and this here was a square own goal for Microsoft.
The other option is to not outsource everything to the cloud. Yeah, it is more convenient ... but in these times, being a bit more self reliant is not a bad thing.
In these times, paying more for that is not an option. Servers with lots of RAM are 5 times what they cost a couple of years ago. Cloud is a huge bargain today compared to running your own infrastructure.
I can't think of any other engineering discipline where demand might increase by a factor of a million in a few seconds because some DNS record was propagated incorrectly or something - regulation won't magically solve the issues unique to software. Maybe it's doable with vastly increased costs (a classic would be running fully redundant 1:1 warm failovers, which nobody could economically do at the cloud provider level.)
That's not to excuse incompetence or whatever, just to note that the benefit of software is precisely how easy it is to change, which will always lead to more problems.
Electrical engineering of the power grid has the exact same failure mode: cascading failures of interconnected power grids can cause loads to increase by factor of a million in a few seconds.
I remember a power outage in 2003 that knocked out power for 55 million people and took over a week to restore in many places.
Note that buggy software was a major contributing factor! The software was designed to, and would have, detected a deteriorating system an hour before anything broke, which would have provided ample time to intervene. However, a race condition caused the whole monitoring system to display stale data and then crash, including the redundant backup. This wasn't the only problem by far, but it was one layer of swiss cheese.
Also note the power companies have clear procedures to reboot the grid, known as a "black start[up]". And they test these procedures, though without taking down the grid.
Which is the kind of exceptionalism that really creates these problems. Software is the only industry that allows people untrained in running global infrastructure to run global infrastructure.
The problem is that you are only as strong as your weakest link. At some point, something somewhere will be architected poorly and it will one day line up perfectly with 2 other bugs that were incredibly hard to predict and then you're stuck in Microsoft's current situation.
Also, power grids are a poor example. There's been multiple instances of absolutely catastrophic failures so hoity toity capital E Engineers also make mistakes.
We took some of the hardest problems in computer science: distributed systems, scale, concurrency and networking, and made them the standard for every To do app.
This is the inevitable consequence.
When I look across the scale of all the failures that have occurred in big tech over the past few years, my self-hosted solutions have been cheaper and more reliable. They are simple. They are small. They are easy to fix and diagnose. Because they're not trying to solve all the world's problems.
People expect software to be feature rich, complex and solve all the world’s problems. And if you don’t do that, the vibe coded competition will beat your cleanly architected product commercially.
It's not even better though. It doesn't have more features because it's a distributed system. It isn't faster because it's a distributed system. Maybe it has a bit higher uptime but nobody was paying too much attention to that anyway, except when it's down. And it's much better for your PR if, when it's down, it isn't down for everyone at once.
Managers and marketers are the ones asking for all those useless features. And god forbid they run out features to ask for, because then they start asking for architecture v2.0 projects.
This is the same as what's been happening with entire industries: Build for the critical path. Eliminate redundancies. Eliminate resiliency. Lean staffing. Just-in-time manufacturing. Single-vendor mandates.
In the name of efficiency and profit, we have stripped away all the safeguards that should prevent cascading failures after the first domino falls. Anything that doesn't return profit now, today, every day, must be purged. Because what if that domino never falls? Then you wasted your money! Think how much you can save if you don't need to make backups! (And every dollar saved is a dollar in my pocket!) Etc.
And torben-friis is right: the only solution to this, demonstrably, is regulation. Require multiple vendors for every major component. Require staffing sufficient to cover a third the company being on vacation. Require resilient systems, that can take a single disaster and keep on trucking, because they are the backbone of our economy.
How did that AWS DNS incident go recently? Unplanned outages are unfortunate but common, and hubris is the problem when everyone assumes that they (or their pet vendor) are immune.
We learned the hard way that there's a very non-obvious inflection point in large distributed systems, where the your design needs to change from accommodating load resiliently via queueing, auto scaling, and such, to a posture of actively scaling back certain features and even shedding load when in a defensive situation.
It's really not intuitive, and at least for me, the need to admit that we couldn't just comp-sci our way out of some conditions was painful.
This sounds suspiciously what occurred when I was working at a large motor sports company. We had a major release of new year models coming out on the website. The deployment went super smooth and then in about 30 mins the site was crashing. Since we were a huge MS client, almost everything we ran was all MS top to bottom.
Site was taken offline, war rooms ensued. 48 hours later, an Ops team from Redmond was flown out. Another three days and they determined it was several legacy servers were going down and the load balancing servers were getting hit so hard, they also failed. It was a cascading effect that killed everything.
CIO was pissed. The company got absolutely lit up on every social media channel for their ineptitude. The CIO vowed it would never happen again, they were upgrading the entire network and infrastructure to avoid it happening again. Fast forward six months to the next major release. Same thing, same panic, same cascading failures because servers were collapsing under the traffic to the website. Another war room, another Ops team flies out. Two days later they figured out it was some buggy code that was causing it.
This after 8 rounds of load balancing testing to the tune of 10X the amount of traffic the site sees on these major release dates without so much as a hiccup.
I left two months later, but the overall feeling was the same - total amateur hour from Microsoft after our company was gifted major discounts to go all in with their hardware & network gear. The company found out the hard way it wasn't a smart decision.
The scary part was this some 20 years ago - seems like not much has changed considering how frequently Github is down now too.
Newest update says that wasn't the issue after all. They say relatively small loads are actually causing servers to become unresponsive and have to be restarted.
They still don't know why this "core process" is maxing out the processor for no reason.
Could be something adjacent - the last time I majorly blew up a release was because something had changed (which was fine) but it caused a list of items to be broken over two pages, but only in prod. Me and a team mate were scratching our heads for the longest time because "what had changed" was quite mundane itself.
The classic 'database is smaller in testing than in prod' problem which is responsible for some outages IME.
Often the 'query was not optimised but that didn't show until prod' one.
They did look at recent changes but none seemed to be related, but it turned out recent network changes triggered a failure mode in a much older network change. Dependent or cascading issues remain hard to diagnose or find.
There was an article posted by a former MS / Azure person earlier this year that described the dumpster fire of node management and their cloud control plane
I can't stand it when I see armchair analysts making claims like this.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour
What would it take for it to be professional hour?
Professional hour would be invisible. Outages don't happen because they were anticipated and prevented.
You can't do much to work around nuclear war or a major asteroid strike, but keeping important things working under normal operating conditions should not be a high bar.
I feel bad for the people working on this. It sounds like desperation is increasing.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
From the 9:41:46 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
From the 9:01:14 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
From the 8:44 PM UTC update:
Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
they are furiously typing at their agents hoping they can figure out what to do. Getting glimps of hope everytime claude says "I found it." only for their hopes to be crused at "Turns out ...". The clown show at Microsoft is surreal.
Current status: Our investigation has found that a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests. We're preparing a configuration change to address this behavior that can be applied across all affected servers, and we're validating it on a subset of servers before applying it more broadly alongside restarts of the affected infrastructure. In parallel, we've begun reverting a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of impact and are monitoring to determine whether this contributes to recovery.
The temporary traffic limitations we previously described are now in effect in specific locations. We're monitoring the affected servers in those locations to confirm whether they remain stable while handling a narrower set of connections, after which we'll gradually reintroduce additional traffic.
---
The list of impacted services just grew tremendously.
From the 12:56:09 AM UTC update:
Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.
- Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.
- Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.
- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.
- Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
- Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Safe Links may be unable to verify URLs, which may impact users clicking links in Outlook and Teams.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: Users may be unable to load Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.
- Microsoft Fabric: Users may encounter failures when exporting reports with sensitivity labels to PDF or PowerPoint, or when updating artifacts with sensitivity labels.
- Microsoft Graph: API requests that access Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar, and contacts, may time out.
- Microsoft Intune
- Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.
- Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, auto-labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Communication Compliance, and Data Classification are impacted, and users may be unable to load Microsoft Purview portal pages.
- Microsoft Teams: Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including calendar, meeting scheduling, and creating chats for organizations using Information Barriers, may fail. Core messaging and online meetings remain largely functional.
- Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
- Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
- SharePoint Online: Features that depend on Exchange Online may be impacted. Accessing files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains functional.
- Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.
- Windows 365: Customers who have configured their tenant and Cloud PCs to use Microsoft Purview Customer Key for Windows 365 Cloud PCs may have users who are unable to connect to their Cloud PCs.
Current status: We've reviewed known impact scenarios and have revised the list of impact services and features, which can be viewed in the "more info" section of this communication.
We're continuing our work to isolate the issue affecting server availability, as well as other workstreams.
---
So much for seeming hopeful.
From the 12:08:53 AM UTC update:
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
Current status: We're applying infrastructure capacity improvements where possible in an effort to help support traffic in regions coming online. We're continuing to monitor the results of changes applied so we can identify strategic actions that can help to improve service health across all affected regions.
---
Hopefulness returns.
From the 1:50:27 AM UTC update:
Current status: We're seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure. We're actively monitoring the performance of these to verify stability which will support improved availability. Remediation actions will be expanded as we confirm stability with the changes applied.
They've tried turning it off and back on again, now they're moving on to identifying strategic actions that can help improve service health.
This doesn't sound like hopefulness, it sounds like somebody's huffing hopium. It sounds like somebody's who's all out of ideas, but there's no direction to go but forward.
While I think it's a bit premature to jump to "AI is at fault", and I will emphasize that I appreciate Microsoft's transparency in their status updates, these updates do have much more of a "we don't know what's going on" feel than any other major outage I can think of.
It's been hours, and the status updates still feel like there is an undertone of frantic panic (understood if you can't determine the root cause). When I think of past major outages, they may have been down for hours but usually folks knew what the root cause was relatively early, even if remediation took some time.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
I think this has to do more with their calculating SLAs for uptime than anything else. Once they have a root cause and start deploying a fix they can "stop the clock" on the outage, even if they don't get to your tenant right away.
Imagine the amount of money they're losing right now in credits that will have to be applied once this finally gets resolved.
> I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
If nothing else, increased change volume will mean the number of candidate diffs ballooned, possible to a level where non-AI review is impossible on incident-level timescales.
Coupled with each change also being AI-documented and the relevant teams having less hands-on understanding of their own changes, so going to the pushing team and asking "Tell me about _____" isn't an option.
You can be surprised because it (apparently) had nothing to do with AI or release pressure. It was a combination effect of two separate network changes.
It doesn't matter if large portions of the grid go down at once. See the recent Spanish outage - the coordination of bringing it back on line is an art of its own.
This is so true. Not making excuses for Microsoft, but OP’s at this very hard. What would have been a “reboot the server” at small scales becomes a concerted operational nightmare at larger scales.
The staging pattern doesn't scale for systems this large and complicated. Everything is constantly in flux and changing. Ive worked on systems this large and we had something we called staging but it was a joke.
Gradual rollout, pilot regions and monitoring are usually how you avoid broken stuff becoming global incidents. Will be interesting to read what process failed here next week.
This type of loadtest I normally only perform ~annually in the companies I have done it. It's normally a ~2 week-long project for an intern to identify failure modes of any client side apps (ie. Retry loops etc), capture a sample of production API requests, create some fake data store either on staging or an instance setup specially for the purpose, adjust the request sample to hit that fake data (reads, writes etc), then replay the sample faster and faster till staging fails due to overload, and practice a recovery procedure with the load still applied.
If it goes well, redo it with different types of overload - especially large percentages of failure responses from various dependencies, or 1000ms delays added to dependency responses which tends to be one of the trickier things to recover from.
Typical outcomes from the work are patches to make the service more robust, fallbacks to not use dependencies or disable features when overload happens, on-call procedures for what to do or not do in certain common cases etc.
Why so? I'd have thought that in situations like this, one would limit inbound connections, either to certain IPs, or through rate limiting controls, all of which should be controllable at the router / network infrastructure level.
Even more so when dealing with a potential incursion (like servers compromised with botnet software that goes back to work not long after a reboot and slams the server and/or network.)
Some form of demand control is generally how you work around these problems, but maybe those parts are falling over too.
For really big services it's also hard to exercise these processes on anything approaching actual prod scale. Ideally you can chop the architecture into pieces where you can simulate region failure and ensure everything works as planned, and fix whatever you find that breaks with every simulation.
But maybe some bits of the architecture aren't amenable to being regionalized.
Reading the status updates feels a lot like watching some of the OpenAI models try to debug a thorny issue. Throwing half-baked solutions at the wall, then reacting in surprise when it makes things worse, getting increasingly detached from reality until someone clears the context and makes it start over.
Nah, they're just debugging a hard problem while the world looks on! The 'normal' problems they have processes to work through, but hey emergent systems and all that - they have to expect the unexpected.
I hope everyone involved in working on this is staying grounded and relaxed and not suffering a ton of physical stress over what is ultimately the result of greedy leadership decisions :(
This needs to be amplified. A lot of the updates carry all the hallmarks of leadership consistently denying the engineering teams the time to build out sufficient introspective and troubleshooting tooling, on the finance-supported rationale that it is not financially justifiable for such low probability events regardless of impact. And this can be as simple as allowing for enough shadow non-Production environments real-time twinning inputs at scale enough to reproduce thundering herd issues, for example.
Take 8:52 PM UTC, for instance. "While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly." So many questions flow from this.
They jumped from "affected servers have become unresponsive" straight to "restarting these servers". No granular troubleshooting of a random sample of the unresponsive cohort to identify the precise origin of the failure mode. Possibly their own organizational chaos prevents the team at the low granularity layer seeing the pattern of whole groups of servers, from effectively interacting with the right team to troubleshoot at the individual server, high granularity layer. I've seen that at many of my clients; sometimes the different teams at different granularity layers don't even have established engagement channels for when things blow up across those granularity layers. I could go on, but you get the drift.
If you obsess over internal tooling, you waste time yak shaving and ship nothing; if you only care about shipping features, technical debt accumulates until a major outage hits. Because cutting corners for speed is the path of least resistance, paying down that complexity later is much harder than maintaining discipline upfront.
Everyone wants to blame the bankers and the bean counters. As I get older I realize that businesses will happily forgo insane sums in the name of predictability and continuity and that it's the team leads and the middle managers who don't want the troubleshooting and the control panels because those would provide an quasi-audit log that would more readily quantify bad management. They see these systems as a threat, a way for information of what's really happening to leak around their control.
Of course not all team leads and middle managers are like this but too many of them are and the bad ones are a great fit for exploiting BigCo environments so BigCos act like a catch basin for them.
Not to defend Microsoft, but the thick-client Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) worked fine during the outage. Nobody couldn't use Excel because of this outage. Outlook worked fine too if you were connecting it to an on-premises Exchange instance.
This was an outage of a server-hosted database for email, not an outage of desktop application software.
Considering the middle management culture at MSFT and other tech BigCo's it's probably better that this be a huge public outage where their crappy managers will actually face some heat for creating the kinds of processes that lead to these outcomes rather than can throw the team under the bus when inevitable human error creeps into their obviously un-followable at scale over time process.
Nadella stripped mined the company for AI jank, and everything has been falling apart. Github has been unreliable a lot lately. Xbox is basically imploding. A lot of Azure, Entra, Intune, etc. is shockingly janky, and there is clearly very little investment in it.
How much of it is deployed with nondeterministic tooling, though?
I remember their customer-side push for semantically merging Office and some other suites into something-or-other like 365 or Copilot, creating enormous confusion. I have difficulty believing MSFT distinguishes between handmade and machine-learning tooling in that type of environment.
Even as recently as 2022 (when I used to work there), infra-as-code use at Microsoft was still very nascent and non-standard. Infra at Microsoft was mostly "ClickOps", with a ton of tribal undocumented knowledge about the right order to do things, changing the defaults, and things like that.
The amount of times we've had to reach out to an experienced person who had transferred to another team/org about processes in our team was ridiculous.
at something AWS scale something is always on fire, they probably measure disk head crashes per second, and they're supposed to insulate it from their clients with layers of redundancy. If those layers are working, they're doing it okay.
Above those layers is a ton of jank, e.g. Elastic Beanstalk. But my understanding is the fundamentals on AWS - compute, storage, networking - are pretty much rock-solid.
Can you clarify what you mean? Do you work there, or have you had negative experiences as a customer?
Disclosure: I work at AWS, at the core EC2 dataplane for many years now. We monitor our production environment very aggressively with tight SLAs that page us at night, and our technical leadership is competent as well.
I read opinions like those but then I worked with Azure at previous jobs a lot and never had any really big issues. On the other side, I just tried using AWS for a small Saas of mine and after setting up SES, I got a shady email, from non-defult support amazon domain that I need to send them scans of my personal documents. Link in that email was blocked by uBlock Origin, domain was not the same as other emails, not a single notification in AWS Support Console anywhere so I ignored it as phishing. Got suspended two weeks later, not a single human in sight within 48 hours of me making a ticket, I just gave up and moved emails to Cloudflare. If I had actual real clients at that phase I'd be pretty pissed. I genuinely don't know how people blindly trust AWS with everything these days, it's 2026 and there's still not even a hard billing limit built into AWS.
I will never understand people crying about MS and Azure when AWS and GCP support are 10x worse. At least Microsoft usually has decent docs and support.
Hardly, Microsofts docs will actively lie to you on functionality and features. Even pointing claude at them will run opus around in circles realizing it's not concrete at all.
If the docs are correct I'm sure they'll depreciate the offering and rename it to something else and leave you on an island either way.
> I worked with Azure at previous jobs a lot and never had any really big issues
to what extent, though? over the course of my working with azure, ive been disappointed constantly, by just about every service i've used. things that should work a particular way don't, and when you try to investigate you end up in a maze of out-of-date and/or totally wrong documentation. i've started a project before, followed their precise "quick start!" guide to the letter, and find it totally non-functional and wrong.
things that DO work end getting updated (often due to financial incentives) and break, or shuddered entirely. some values that you might want to change for certain services are hard-coded (which, to their credit, you can verify from their public github repos) for ostensibly no reason. a lot of their documentation is internal only, and the public facing stuff feels perennially out-of-season.
(opinion) i feel like fundamentally microsoft has embraced ai development so wholly because they've not been able to describe their services in documentation very well, and thus rely heavily on the ai's ability to digest what scraps of truth remain and the various source code to be effective at delivering output
I don't know exactly what's going on with today's outage.
But this is certainly exactly what I'd expect after indiscriminately laying off half your workers, then immediately offering a buyout to make sure any experienced people still standing will find their way to the door.
If this incident, or the difficulty they're having with remediation (update: holy shit, they still haven't even identified the problem), are somehow not caused by any of that, then it's at least a preview of what things are going to be like.
You are right, thank you. I suspect they would have layed off people in certain areas to milk the cow, while invested in hiring talent in areas of growth. Still no evident correlation between layoffs and the current blackout incident mostly affecting the Cloud business.
So a few years ago Nadella was a God among CEOs capturing OpenAI at the right time etc..but yeah laying off thousands of tenured folks surely is great strategy, god I hate the tech industry.
Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
I made the switch to Linux Mint and it’s wonderful and almost triples my battery life. I’m also in the process of switching to a phone with graphene os which runs like butter and feels so much more secure, safe and private.
Battery gains on laptops are insane. Swapped a month ago on one, still need windows stuff on the other, but same model and one last all day and one has to be plugged in each session.
and that's crazy because traditionally Linux would drain your battery faster because it was lacking all the power optimisations. It still is, but windows must've gotten so bloated it's worse now.
It's been three months since I switched to Arch. I've had a couple of hiccups that I couldn't resolve with an agent, or that I simply didn't want to spend too much time troubleshooting. Other than that, performance has been absolutely amazing. My terminal and browser open in milliseconds, not seconds. Even the heavy system I work on builds and loads in seconds instead of minutes. If I don't like a particular configuration, I can simply ask my agent to change it. Linux is GREAT in the agent era.
I tried few distros including Mint but in the end CachyOS was one that works for me best. But I still got this W11 virtual machine where I can see how the system "evolves", and it still baffles me that Microsoft has the audacity to throw message saying "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" and having "Energy recommendations" that "Lower your carbon footprint" where background processes continue to drain machine resources at random intervals since W10
Crappy as in doesn't need third party full access to all accessibility untrusted toold for stuff like mouse scrolling the currect direction, volume control on external hdmi monitors, being able to navigate the UI using a keyboard, having the computer staying running when connected to a power source, etc?
One has to spend more on third party tools for getting MacOS to feature parity with a windows than a Win Pro license...
Linux is fine on the other hand, but you compared to a joke of an operating system.
>>Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
This is just an anecdote, but I have the exact opposite experience. I'm a C++ games developer working on Windows 11 every day and other than the micro frustrations with stupid UI, the system just works. I know I can rely on it day to day. But I was also given a MacBook last year for our iOS ports and I don't understand how anyone considers it a serious operating system for work - it's full of bugs to a point where I started using AI to work around some of them. I thought maybe MacOS 27 would fix some of them and sure it did - but then it introduced a whole bunch of new ones. As a developer it's probably the worst OS you could pick - if you hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux, at least you have actual control over your OS compared to MacOS where basic things like spotlight are broken and there's no way to fix them other than add to the thousands of complaints on apple forums.
> hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux,
Honestly, for personal machines the M series is wonderful hardware, and I have young kids so no time to tune Linux (I ran it at home for around a decade or so).
But yeah, the interface has many, many bugs.
My "favourite" (new) bug is that sometimes you can't move a window from the laptop screen to another screen. It goes away if you full screen the app, but it's bizarre to me that it made it to production.
Nadella's AI fumble is a true generational fuck up. They had OpenAI, they had complete access to GPT models before any one, they even had the first coding assistant concept.
Then due to typical clueless management and lack of taste and complete buffoonery, they just fucked it all up. I'm not complaining because I think everyone is better off, but it's just amazing to have witnessed that even when they luck out on a bet, they manage to fuck it up. Copilot started as a coding assistant, and before it could breath they destroyed the brand by shoving the name into literally everything without thinking or taste. Ignored the coding part, because that's lame, and instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use. Once claude code dominated the scene, they realized the major fuckup and tried to catch up, but it's too little too late.
> instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use.
I actually know quite a few (non-tech) people that love to use Copilot in those apps. So I'm not sure it's as big of a fuck-up as you think it is (or as I certainly used to think it is).
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are profitable and useful. People prefer something that's expensive and useful over something that's just expensive. For some reason though it's only the people who are making useless things who are making anything at all. Nobody else tapped into the Cybertruck market segment at all.
I'm not really sure I'm understand what you're trying to say tbh. Though tangentially what even is the Cybertruck market segment to begin with?
On profitable products though; sure as a general concept, but the rate of return, opportunity cost and market competition factor into the profitability equation too. You could go waste your time building a desktop app for a chatgpt clone and make some "profit" in the same time your competitor threw similar resources at making a claude code and that makes 100x your profit. That would mean you actually lost despite the profit. The opportunity cost isn't only in building the wrong thing, but also in the human resources you allocated to the task that deprived other areas. I see no world where the 6 dozen copilots we got from Microsoft have any good ROI beyond diluting a brand and making them more of a laughing stock.
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are beneficial to society as a whole. Not "profitable." Profit just means more money going from the many to the few. That's what's gotten us into this awful situation.
What good is thinking about the most beneficial things to society if you and your faction will never have the power to implement them or even to persuade those who do have that power?
Well, one of the things that I'm very, very certain is beneficial to society as a whole is getting the fascists and those who think that profit should be the first, last, and only concern out of power now and forever.
So fortunately, there's not really an incompatibility there.
If the Cybertruck were making good money it wouldn't be getting canceled a few years into its run on the market. No car company does that to successful products.
I don't understand how basically everything has languished under Nadella. Apple doesn't sell MacOS, so it should be less incentivized to keep improving it, but it is way better than Windows and the gap keeps widening. If I didn't use MacOS, I would just use Linux.
Windows does always cater to backwards companility and making IT departments happy, so that explains some of the lagging technology and systems. I can't believe NTFS is still the default file systems. That's generations behind Apple's APFS.
The stock has popped, and that's what Wall Street cares about, but I could see a world where this chronic underinvestment and mismanagement basically implodes the entire company in the coming years.
I suspect if the threat of AI cloning pans out as some say, we may see a sharp return to streaming - perhaps devs releasing on streaming platforms only - as an ultimate form of anti-piracy
Here, Series S is £400-£430 for 512GB or £500-£520 for 1TB.
Xbox Series X is £600-£620 for digital 1TB or £50 more for the disc version. That's much more than I paid for mine a year after launch (£450 I think), but luckily still nowhere near 1700 Euros.
The sales have fallen off compared to the Playstation.
A quick google search turned up these global sales numbers: PS3 87.40 million, PS4 117.20 million, PS5 96.44 million. Xbox 360 85.73 million, Xbox One 57.96 million, Xbox Series X/S 35.68 million.
I'm usually late in getting new console generations (didn't care for paying for new generation premium), so I remember looking to buy an Series S/X a year ago and it wasn't anywhere, there was wild speculation about a new generation or those handheld things taking over.
It seems to be back in stock now, but at a cost of about 1000 Euros for a Series/S I'm not really feeling enticed even if GTA 6 is around the corner. They probably really shot themselves in the foot by not having units out a year ago and now fewer will buy due to pricing.
Well, speaking for myself, paying the new console premium for my PS5 turned out to be a decent deal given used ones go for about the same at the moment...
Their console is no longer their primary objective though, xbox live is where it's at - tons of people did the math, why buy a console when you can get a subscription with tons of games for 3+ years for the same money instead? It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day).
I think Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with the digital only consoles too - unless they maintain a very attractive set of exclusives at all times, people will just choose whichever digital subscription is best or cheapest for them instead of something tied to a particular console.
I think they've broken the trust with exclusives and don't think they can get it back quickly, almost all of the best PS4 exclusives that I can think of ended up on PC anyway. Exclusives won't be a factor for me when weighing up a PS6
Xbox Live subs are something like half of what they projected. This is why they are closing so many studios and laying people off. Xbox Live is not bringing in the money.
They need to sell consoles to get people to become subscribers.
Xbox Live is the old subscription service, it has since morphed into Xbox Game Pass which is the monthly subscription to access a bunch of games (as well as online features Xbox Live offered before)
Xbox Game Pass was an attractive offer for consumers when MS was getting people onboard and the price was so heavily subsidized that it could never have been a sustainable model. Once they tried to start bumping the price into something profitable people immediately said "okay well that's clearly not worth it, I'll just cancel."
They attempted to make it $30/month last year before backtracking. At $360/year, even factoring in the new $70 price of AAA new releases and ignoring you can wait a few months to buy them cheaper, you had to be buying 5 new release games per year at launch just to get close to breaking even with the subscription price. 6 before you save money. So...
> It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day)
No, it's absolutely not worth it for these people. Even at the current prices they backtracked to ($280/year if you want to play new releases on day 1), if you're a person who doesn't game that much, it's cheaper to just buy a few new games per year. If you're not a frequent gamer, why would you of all people need access to a massive library of games?
I personally have a backlog of 45 games I want to play written down in a note. And those are just the ones I wrote down. Most of these games you can get for peanuts. I just played through Fallout New Vegas for my first time. It regularly goes on sale for $0.99, or $5 if you want all the DLC. I got 90 hours of playtime out of that.
The idea any casual gamers should be paying for a subscription service to a Netflix-style game library is nuts to me. These aren't movies and tv shows you'll be flying through every evening, they're big games that can take weeks to play even if you're putting in a few hours per day.
OTOH, I couldn’t manage Entra without their AI chatbot. That system is a Lovecraftian stack of sadness built upon despair, of which mortals are not meant to know.
This really is the honest truth, every interaction I have with the MS platform is somehow worse than an actual dumpster fire. AI is the only thing keeping the ship afloat. Then again maybe that's the point?
I have the pro Microsoft copilot subscription at work just so I can search Outlook and teams since the native search doesn't turn up things when I search exact strings that are in the messages or use filters for other things like sender or recipient. Crazy to have to use an llm just to find an email
Especially when they bought a superb product just for searching Outlook (LookOut), incorporated it into Windows Search and somehow destroyed it in the process.
I used legacy relatively happily when I had a windows laptop, but recently switched to a MacBook and it either forced migration or was already the new version (don't remember). The macos outlook is a bit borked too. Beyond the typical level for outlook. Can't create or edit rules anymore that save to server. Need to go into the web version via browser.
Fabric is a weird one, as it's sortof a GUI over spark, but also PowerBI and lots of weird services.
It feels like a "data plaform" for people who've never used one before and only have the vaguest idea of what it means.
That being said, Spark is pretty good and we're running a lot of workflows on it (and probably building more on top, I suspect that I'll be much angrier about it in approximately 6 months or so).
The only reason companies use Entra is it appears cheaper but eventually you pay as much as competitors. Okta is a way better IAM solution if you need one. Although it’s very pricey.
I am aware that the authentication subsystems have major structural problems which make finding things like exfiltration bugs in azure surprisingly common. I suspect the current incident is related. I'm hoping it's also caused by too much insufficiently supervised AI coding on poor architectural foundations, and that being caused by that will be obvious and hopefully become public. But that's just speculation on my part.
My take is the reason companies use Azure is lack of imagination. Like Service Now. Just horrible software, and thems that make the decision to buy it aren't the one's who have to use it.
Vendor lock in is always a thing really, you don't always get choice in SaaS providers and how they auth. Could of course choose another SaaS provider but then that starts reducing the pool, assuming you have alternatives.
After the last couple of updates on entra, where you keep getting the "loading dots" to just pull up is insane. I still use Azure or PowerShell to do the task by the time it can "load up".
You don't understand, the agents aren't fixing the outage because those human engineers didn't make the infrastructure AI first. The only possible follow-up from this is that the faulty infra needs to be completely thrown away in favor of the vibecoded replacement.
I agree. All the execs need to do is tell Copilot to "fix this so that it never happens again. Make no mistakes" and run it on bypass permissions. Tada!
I believe it has more to do with him force-feeding Microsoft employees on A.I. resulting in slop code and outages.
If this continues the company will see a lot of customers leaving. And they were already in a bind since Europe is finally realizing that its dependence on American tech could be used against them. Luckily most European politicians are corrupt and can easily be bought to prevent them from ditching Azure and Windows.
> Luckily most European politicians are corrupt and can easily be bought to prevent them from ditching Azure and Windows.
They're not corrupt (in a lot of cases), mostly just ignorant. Like, they don't understand the tech, and microsoft is safe, they're already using it so handing over large swathes of their infra to them seems reasonable.
MS have wonderful sales people, and this is why they do well with governments and large enterprises.
There's also a co-ordination problem, in that all of your counterparties (like your citizens, for instance) are familiar with MS and therefore it costs a bunch locally to move, for little short-term reward.
This is actually a place where (good) regulation could derisk a lot of these changes, but you'd need a committed group of politicians who can convince the civil servants to keep at it. It'll happen, but slowly and in starts over the next 5-15 years.
I literally had a person from IT tell me “Firefox is open source so it’s not secure, that’s why we have to use Edge” the other day. They are beyond hopeless.
And Microsoft is being smart by cultivating this worldview. Open source has no such thing. In general, the company with the best marketing can be expected to win the market. Product quality plays only a minor role.
Microsoft also sells contracts to companies and open source does not. If "open source" does, it's someone like Red Hat who has to take on all the legal responsibility themselves, just like Microsoft does, and that makes the product as expensive as Microsoft's, only it's not subsidized by mass surveillance so it's even more expensive.
i had a very similar experience with a co-founder and ceo.
it took half an hour to even somewhat convince them that academic/postgrad student open source projects with one commit four years ago are not the same thing as linux/ubuntu/docker/etc.
sibling makes a good point tho. what they were probably thinking was “we want to be able to blame someone who is not us if it goes wrong at some point”. that’s 90% of the microslop business pitch right there.
open source, it’s on you. microslop, it’s on them.
Where does corruption start and lobbying begin? American cloud providers are hosting more than $340 billion worth of European workloads on their infrastructure, including email, videoconferencing, office documents and storage.
If they transfer this to sovereign providers it would cost Big Tech serious money. So they're quietly lobbying to slow down the speed at which European nations are moving away from them.
> If they transfer this to sovereign providers it would cost Big Tech serious money. So they're quietly lobbying to slow down the speed at which European nations are moving away from them.
Yeah, this is definitely really important to them (not important enough for them to comply with the laws, but whatevs).
insufficiently supervised AI on top of poorly architected sales and marketing driven decisions looks like it's a good recipe for a nice warm garbage fire
Support in Europe has been nearly dismantled in favor of low cost countries. I wonder how they expect it to function now they it's basically third parties withan AI slapped on top.
I essentially said this in a sibling post whose parent asked why it seems like nobody knows the codebase anymore except my post was immediately flagged.
I think this is the logical conclusion of using copilot to write your stuff for the last two years. Nobody knows what it does and more and more bugs are being solved by just pointing the AI back to it again. Combine with the fact that so many people have been laid off and replaced with copilot I'm not surprised that the few who remain aren't quite sure how to solve it
And yet, for some reason, we have to _prove_ this is the case, as though in the history of time, engineering something has ever proven ok as a careless endeavor.
It's impacting all businesses running MS hosted Outlook, that would also include companies with 100,000 of employees. It's a global issues not just one area.
Well Microsoft made everyone move to managed exchange/outlook right? I was told you can’t self host anymore. How did they not design for regional resiliency?
One of them has two servers on AWS behind a load balancer. That's the very least of resilience.
Another one has one server in a datacenter running their primary service on a single VM. That server had issues with RAM chips a couple of years ago that brought it down a few times. However they are not crazy. They made the choice to keep their data at home, bought reportedly good hardware, accepted there there might be consequences. They have other less beefy servers but they did not load balance their service on VMs on different servers.
I think that we can agree that this is no resilience. Is it by design as in "I want my service not to be reliable"? Of course not. Is it lack of quality in the design? Of course it is. But does it matter from the point of view of the users of the service?
I run several services on a VM, with no automation to restore them if there's a hardware issue with the VM host. (There is some resiliency: a managed datacentre, the servers have RAID, dual PSUs, dual network, etc.)
For over 10 years, this has not been a problem. We understand the risk, and know how to restore services onto a different VM host if necessary.
I think the more complex system (e.g. K8S) has problems when people don't fully understand it. We've had outages there, caused by misconfigurations or unexpected behaviour.
You design to the needs. I have resilience in my home DNS so I have a 100% availability bounded on the home (if the home is burnt down then I'll lose DNS)
At work I designed DNS to survive the loss of a city, so again 100% uptime. The riskiest part is deploying changes, which is why the deployment doesn't run in parallel and confirms state before deployment.
Resilience isn't hard when you aren't trying to serve a billion customers. The problem is we are addicted to a "winner takes all" economy, which leads to fragility. If Tesco breaks, I can go to Sainsburys, or Aldi, or Lidl, or Iceland, or get in the car and go to Asda or Morrisons. That's diversity.
But in IT the goal is all those follow the same gartner reports and all use the "best supplier" for their backend infrastructure, and if that supplier breaks then they can't restock any supermarkets.
That's a terrible risk and needs to be stopped, not encouraged. But the individual incentives are for the CTO of each supermarket to choose what the consultants tell them. If they don't they are accountable for the choice of not using things like "industry standard".
While it's probably true that no one specifically seeks to remove resiliency for its own sake, basically the entirety of our corporate world has, over the past several decades, been relentlessly redesigning everything in ways that remove resiliency. Because resiliency is almost inherently antithetical to efficiency. At the most fundamental level, if you want to make sure you have a backup of your data, that means you need at least 2x the amount of storage. And, of course, if you want to make sure you can operate even if a critical employee gets sick/is hit by a bus/goes on vacation, you need to hire extra employees.
Is there any proof that "self hosted" is still working, wouldn't surprise me if at least part of it relies on centralised services.
In a sane world the CTOs choosing this would be held accountable. The massive global economic fragility which is created by the centralisation of society is a massive risk. Diversity is important, we see it time and time again how optimisation causes panic, from crowdstrike to microsoft. When your outsourced provider is "too big to fail", you have a problem that government needs to deal with.
I haven't had occasion to spin-up Exchange SE yet, but I've read plenty of descriptions of other admins running it. I have no reason to believe Exchange itself relies on any centralized features. "New Outlook" has been alleged to use centralized servers even when connected to an on-prem Exchange SE install, and given that it's "modern" MSFT software that wouldn't surprise me, but anybody stupid enough to use "new Outlook" gets what they deserve.
They're still trying to find the root cause apparently. The status updates I've seen (the page seems dodgy, probably millions of people hammering it every millisecond) don't sound very optimistic as of yet.
Hey, at least they fixed the status page. A few hours earlier, it was loading a 16MB JavaScript file over 2 minutes or something. It's much faster now, though I haven't checked if that file is smaller, or just the pipe got better.
When I first saw this I commented it must be bad, but that was 4 hours ago after a whole day of "welp i guess i'm not emailing anyone and meetings are pushed.".
It's 7PM PST now and I cannot imagine how fucking on fire things must be for it to not only still be down, but basically with no real communication from what i've seen (like yes there's updates, but not the "root cause found, triaging".)
In an era where everyone's vibe coding Excel clones, this is NOT the time to be fucking up your KEY moat on a catastrophic level.
Not sure why the execs and VPs aren't asking their AI agents to triage. They've been implying they don't need engineers anymore, isn't this the best time to prove themselves right?
The last email received by my partner’s work inbox was a cheerful update from their CTO or whatever about the wonderful progress they had made by moving all employees to work primarily in OneDrive. I kind of wonder if he’s just run away since then.
Imagine how frequently this will happen when old employees take the buyout option. Coupled that with the constant layoffs, the nect decade looks promising for MSFT
My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.
Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.
I mean, I think the teams hate can be funny sometimes, but I honestly don’t get it. I’ve used all of the BIG programs. They’re all the fucking same. I can’t point to a single thing that Teams does drastically worse than any of the other options. I think it’s just a meme.
Preface: I have zero love for Slack. It’s a thing. It’s fine. I can take or leave it.
Using Teams after being used to Slack is like going from VSCode to Eclipse. I’m sure this thing is powerful, but it looks weird, it feels weird, it moves like January molasses, and it has a million features I’m completely uninterested in. I’m sure some people get value from all the baroque. I am not one of them.
(I’d rather be using IRC and Emacs but the world has other ideas.)
Not a slack power user by any means. But went from Slack to Teams and barely noticed much of a difference. We chat when it’s small and pick up the phone when it’s not. I don’t want to automate and add plugins and whatever; I want to do my work, but occasionally that means talking with other people over chat, I type and they see it. Needs met.
I haven't used others, but can they really also not search through the history and jump *fully* to that point? In teams I have to adapt my search once I reach end of context so the context changes.
Discord gets hate for their bad search, but it's vastly superior to teams.
> For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account
I can conjecture some reasons. Datamining would be high on the list, since MS can read your mail and thus market to you more effectively. Governments might also be happier if MS can provide them with one-stop access (like Prism) to otherwise self-hosted e-mail accounts proxied through a central server.
I would strongly doubt (though not completely rule out) that Microsoft is reading your personal mail hosted on your personal mail server. Like what would that even look like, their IMAP client is forwarding email to headquarters?
BUT, more likely, it's some sort of "check in" or "dial home" feature that isn't working. Or plausibly, maybe they count "local user checked email" and their analytics endpoint is down.
Regardless, it's definitely surprising that a traditional desktop application would be blocking when only polling from local/trusted data sources.
It probably is a mirror for caching purposes for the mobile app or something. It lets them control the protocol between the client and their server as well.
But a check in or analytic counter wouldn’t stop you from receiving email. This is most likely due to Microsoft’s server (not your local computer) being the one fetching the mail.
It is normally probably more reliable; except when their server is down.
This is correct. You have the option to disable it and use local IMAP if you want, but it pushes you toward using "Microsoft Sync Technology" which does exactly what you were saying/
I mean, I can still switch to Thunderbird anytime I want, because I use IMAP and don't yank the mail messages from my mail server. And I can still receive mail on my iPhone anyway.
"New" Outlook does route all traffic through Microsoft servers. I assume it's so you can get a "unified" mail look on all your devices (phone, etc), but likely a nice source of data mining
Personally, I can't reconcile having a self-hosted email server and using Outlook to access said email.
I'm being an ass in saying this, because I'm aware human motivation is a beautiful kaleidoscope of variables, but I would have guessed at the venn diagram of 'those willing to compromise and use a Microsoft product' is mutually exclusive with that of the 'I'm hardcore enough to self-host email'.
I will say, however, that Outlook used to be one of the better desktop email programs, so I'll grant some legacy lenience.
Biggest data heist and most obvious US intelligence operation in human history. I can't fathom why AVs don't treat "Outlook New" as info stealer malware.
I’m pretty certain their desktop client applies filters server-side.
I’m pretty certain because my company’s phishing-test emails skip my filters (I assume admins have a “skip filters” toggle). Which, hilariously, makes it even easier to ensure there’s a place that contains only phishing test emails (filter all not on allow-list of domains to one place, filter all on that list to another, ta-da, the main inbox now contains only phishing test emails)
I assume they do the same thing with non-MS email if you use their client, rather than maintain two filter implementations.
Allegedly, It's so they can use push notifications efficiently from a central place for new mail notifications. Mobile IMAP clients cannot reliably keep a TCP connection open, due to on-device power-management and network management purposes. IMAP natively supports push-based notifications, but mobile networks make that impossible to work reliably.
Which is odd. I also have Outlook for iOS, and the accounts I add in Outlook for Windows don't automatically appear in my Outlook for iOS, even though I have the same Microsoft account logged in in both. So I don't understand how they plan to make push notifications work better for me on my iPhone by relaying my IMAP e-mail account.
When the excellent Windows 10 Mail app was deprecated and they tried to push Outlook that would work through their online services, I switched to Wino Mail (open remake of Windows 10 Mail). My email works.
Because the new Outlook app is actually a web app talking to a Microsoft Web Server that does the actual mail retrieval. This is all clearly explained in their documentation.
Update from Microsoft:
"We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.
"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."
Update as of 10 minutes ago implies that didn't work:
> Current status: We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
So health checks were correct… this solution of silencing the first symptom is probably just adding to the problem. I am afraid they may be opening the door for the fire trucks and getting some other kind of intrusion instead. Better they shut it down for day and do proper fix.
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
---
The 10:11:39 PM UTC update is a little chilling. They don't know why what's happening is happening so they're doing experiments.
I do that with closed-source software when I don't want to bother trying reverse engineer it, but these guys have the code! Yikes.
I recognize that even w/ the code available there are likely behaviors that aren't likely to be anticipated because of the scale of traffic. Complex systems fail in complex and non-intuitive ways.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
The code by itself doesn't tell you how the various components of a complex distributed system interact in a failure condition with clients hammering retries.
I mean it sort of does if you know the whole system inside and out and have the ability to reason about it, but just having the code for each component doesn't by itself solve the real problem of understanding
The 03:07:45 AM UTC update doesn't sound promising either:
Current status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
Well, my mac CI runs aren't being picked up, and they eventually fail because of it. So maybe wherever connects the orchestrator to the machines is having issues.
Funny thing is that my work's VPN that uses the MS authenticator just quit, immediately after I made that comment. So you are even more correct than usual.
I asked someone in our teams meeting if they were having issues with their outlook today. What followed was a 5 minute hate fest on outlook. I'm not a big fan, but was kind of surprised so many people genuinely hate it.
It’s not just that it’s stupid. It’s broken. It can’t handle email that is on the server and not on the machine, and they’ve configured the app to store most email only on the server.
That choice is also so stupid. Why doesn't Outlook just store the text of every single email on all devices. The stupid software needs gigabytes of storage, why can't it spend a couple of megabytes on making e-mail actually work.
down detector always looks like this during big cloud service outages. i think partly because people don't actually know what services they're using and report wrong things, and partly because downdetector parses social media posts like "outlook is down but gmail still works" as outlook and gmail both being down.
Downdetector is a survey, not a detector, and suffers from user confusion when a high-profile service is actually down, as users start reporting unrelated things
The biggest problem with downdetector is how they visualise their outage graphs.
The Y axes are entirely independent, and so when there's an outage for Microsoft Outlook (which peaked at ~130k reports) and you get a negligable spike in pepole who get confused and report gmail (~1k reports), the graphs all look correlated and connected.
They need to show the graphs with an absolute y-axis set by the worst outage, or scale the graphs by estimated average daily users or something.
Here's a theory: A network change made connection setup more expensive or forced mass reconnects, saturating the front ends’ secure-connection process. Saturated servers fail health checks and get pulled, so the survivors take more load and fail too. Every client that gets dropped reconnects, and each reconnect needs a fresh secure handshake. That is why restarted servers die as soon as traffic returns. The outage now sustains itself even with the trigger being reverted, hence the traffic blocking and staged reintroduction.
The most recent surge is likely retry amplification, partly caused by their own traffic rebalancing.
They should be able to mitigate that at the border. Whatever load balancing solution is in place should just drop connections before they get to a point that can overload the system. That they haven't, or can't, makes me think it's more complicated than "it's hard to bring it back up when everyone is trying to get back in"
So i know fuck all and am basically just rubbernecking the car crash at this point, but I would've agreed however they just dropped this gem:
> Current status: As part of our ongoing efforts to advance the recoverability of our frontend servers, we’re evaluating traffic controls that can be applied to increase capacity and stability. This includes traffic optimization actions such as traffic throttling, protocol adjustments, and failover routing intended to improve stability in active regions. In parallel, were expanding internal testing to track activity within a contained environment to improve traffic monitoring and issue detection capabilities.
That...kinda reads like they're just trying it? I'm assuming there's something being missed or it's a "fuck it try it again" but I do wonder if some story is going to come out of people in the decision making seats who don't know what they're doing.
Sounds like it running correctly was the meta-stable state. Failure is actually more stable since it can reach a failed state from the ground state of simply not running.
Isn’t this very similar cause to the AWS us-east-1 outage from last year. I thought I remember it being about a network change that overloaded servers, leading to a cascading failure.
> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Oh man, Yes Minister is almost too good. I was making my way through that series as well, a while back, but I think I got sidetracked by Trump winning the election and Yes Minister just seemed like the actual news.
I'll get back into it. Can't recommend it highly enough.
Probably self inflicted by some code change, as they mention "specific type of service traffic".
EDIT: Seems like now they confirmed that: "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service."
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
> Previous status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
If failures started at some point in time then something must have changed just prior to that. If no changes in traffic were detected (no DDOS) then it must have been a change, be it code or config. Duuuh.
> then something must have changed just prior to that
Not at all, they could have simply hit an unexpected behavior for their infra they hadn't seen, tested, or expected before. Global scale infra gets very, very complex, and tbh this is Microsoft... they're not very good at it.
Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems. It's usually config change or code change, not necessarily in the component that's misbehaving, but it is somewhere.
As someone who worked in infrastructure for a large global CDN, this sort of overload issues happen all the time when trying to bring infrastructure back online after an issue.
First, you have every client retrying connections, whether automated or manual retries. This generates extra load over normal.
In addition, whichever systems come online first often get a ton of traffic sent to them, which can immediately bring them back down if you don't have ways to prevent it. You will get a wave of systems coming back online, a ton of traffic hitting them, and then falling over again.
Now, I am sure Microsoft is used to this and has procedures and systems in place to mitigate the issues (I know we did).
However, sometimes if the right combination of services are failing, even the strategies you had to avoid this sort of failure can themselves fail.
I know it’s not actually that easy but don’t they just have some gateway that’s rejecting 100% of requests and they very gently lower that intentional rejection percentage over time?
However, in other cases it can be more complicated. For example, if the requesters are other internal services, they might not be behind a single gateway (although you should then have other controls you can use). Other times, it is not easy to block the RIGHT requests, because it is hard to distinguish which backend services will end up being hit by a request (a single request can trigger multiple calls to multiple services).
There is also the problem of catch up - if a system in a stable state is close to max capacity, it might never have the capacity to recover from a failure even if the entire system is restored. For example, imagine a log processing system that can just barely handle the normal peak load; if you have a failure where your producers locally store logs until they can send them upstream, you will have to clear that backlog, which requires additional capacity beyond a full steady state, which you might not have.
And you never really get an opportunity to thoroughly test these failure & recovery modes until something catastrophic happens, at which point capturing detailed metrics and assessing the right sequence to perform the actions are both challenging at best.
Yep. There is simply no load testing you can do when you reach certain levels of traffic. Nothing can generate the type of load you get when you have millions of end users making requests from thousands of different networks, on different equipment and network configurations.
Yeah every IT dept is sending out that notification. Someone replied with 'When do you expect it to be back online?" to which I LOL emoted at the moment. I think I'm a jerk. But how can you ask such a question- as if they planned a time to restore services and aren't working to restore it as quickly as possible?
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
AI is good at incident diagnosis, but AI slop code may have actually caused this: designing to avoid cascading failures is something AI doesn't do so well
The place where I consistently see AI/LLMS/Agents/language-widgets-with-tools fail at making decent code (and more often configuration) is infrastructure.
The number of times it has spit out a python program where a much simpler bash script would do, is too many to count.
I have a pet theory that if you don't know what you really want, and aren't skilled enough to understand what you got, infra code is THE WORST.
Anecdote: I wanted a simple change to an ansible playbook today. GPT-6-Astra/codex came up with the most convoluted, brittle solution possible the first time, even though it was extending and already clear, idiomatic playbook. It took some amount of offensive and critical prompting to get it to use ansible's built in modules and tooling to do the same job - and do so with nearly 80% less configuration and like 1000% more human readability.
Some part of me harbours a sneaking suspicion that the "throw everything at it" ethos is by design, not as a defensive measure against crappy code, but as a way to ensure there's so much code and it's so convoluted orgs and operators (or developers) are stuck/addicted.
It's still a force multiplier - but it's by no means driverless, especially for existing/already-running infra.
I work as a (depressed lol) sysadmin apprentice in a small MSP company (I live in Europe) and boy do I got a story about Ansible playbooks: We made an offer to one of our clients to automate the deployment of software to their computers (this is a client with around 150-200 employees, depending on whether you count only the "core" employees or also security and maintenance staff). Before we made and implemented this offer using Ansible, they did not have any sort of Software Deployment tool whatsoever, everything got installed fully manually.
(they also used to have local admin rights on all of their client computers until one employee got phished and literally gave away their personal ID card via a webcam)
In any case, guess who got to implement all the relevant playbooks for installing software and what tool they used for it? Our company literally handed the job to an intern who had no IT background whatsoever. I say this not to be mean, he was legitimately just at our company because a government program required him to do an internship.
He used Deepseek (our company does not believe in purchasing LLM subscriptions, at least not for us normal employees) to write literally all of the playbooks for any kind of software that mattered to our clients.
Now, as I said before, I am only an apprentice, and I am certainly not a good programmer by any means, but I read through parts of the Ansible documentation and had worked with it before, and I understood enough to at least be able to roughly judge whether a playbook made sense or was just way too complicated and convoluted.
I had to help this intern out multiple times, because he hadn't yet understood that, in order to write a functioning playbook, you first had to somewhat understand how to deploy a piece of software on a single test machine using CMD or Powershell syntax with an according .exe or .msi.
He simply prompted, pasted the playbook and then reprompted with the error codes from the failed playbook until it somehow worked or until I had to help him out.
This took place in December or November of last year and the playbooks are mostly still pretty shitty if I am being honest.
I did take away an important lesson from this "episode", though: LLMs can be very usefuly for writing code, or in this case, Ansible playbooks, but only if you have a somewhat decent and basic grasp of how software installation works via CMD/powershell and if you took the time to read through and learn about at least the basic Ansible concepts.
Since I am only an apprentice (on paper and in terms of my knowledge and how I get paid, not in terms of how much I am expected to earn for the company), I have painfully experienced how important it is to possess a certain level of understanding about the infra-related code and scripts that you would like LLMs to write for you, because otherwise it very quickly spirals out of control and starts throwing everything at the problem, just as you described.
With engineering rigor. They are fantastic tools for quickly navigating large codebases, ingesting large amounts of data, refactoring legacy code, compiling multiple formats of data, following defined patterns, and many other proper uses for the tools.
That doesn’t mean the code/result doesn’t still need to meet our engineering standards.
> Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
One of the best ways to deal with doing something the wrong way is to get rid of all the people who know how to do it correctly. That way no one knows any better, so no one has to confront the fact they're actually doing it wrong.
I really don't see the correlation, actually. On the contrary, I'm finding nasty defects with it that have been dormant for long and handwaved away, with repros to reveal them.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.
SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.
Not impossible, but very unlikely. CLFS isn’t remotely reachable, it's a kernel driver reached through local API calls and has no network listener. AFAIK the historical CLFS CVEs are all rated as local.
Except, once again Microsoft crapped the bed... it's not an RCE in any capacity...
> Revision 2.1, Nov 7: “Added an FAQ and updated the CVSS score. This is an informational change only.”
> Vector: now AV:L and UI:R (local attack vector, user interaction required), scoring 7.0.
The snarky but honest response is HackerNews/Reddit. But if you're trying for something that actually checks the sites you point it at instead of relying on users reporting "issues", a buddy of mine runs https://onlineornot.com/ and it seems generally more reliable.
Full Disclosure, this is a Cisco product and I work there.
ThousandEyes Internet Insights offers a public outage map at https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ that is MASSIVELY more accurate (and faster to detect) than Down Detector because its based on actual telemetry and not on crowdsourcing.
Yes, just to confirm, it seems that our platform is getting hammered at the moment and it's causing the page to take a long time to load or intermittently load. We are looking into it.
There will be a more detailed message when we finish the SII on our status page at the link I previously provided, but the short version is we took way more traffic than normal to our platform and the related workers were running out of memory.
The public outage map is primarily a marketing page, because customers receive deeper insights in-product. Given that most people discuss outages live/up-to-the-minute on Twitter, that is why its where we default to sharing.
That's definitely your prerogative. Internet Insights uses various techniques to analyze billions of metrics gathered daily from hundreds of thousands of vantage points around the Internet to detect outages in minutes, while providing (in the paid product) corroborating evidence based on that collected telemetry to support its conclusions. Crowdsourcing is subject to the vagaries of crowds.
It seems like one of the best methodologies there is? Real people reporting real outages of a service they use?
I often know about outages dozens of minutes in advance of it being posted on official channels (or in the case of AWS, three days later...).
So what if the resolution is low because people can't log in to Fortnite and an Azure outage gets shown as an Epic Games outage. Doesn't matter. The live feed is incredibly reassuring from a "down for anyone else this instant, before official status page has a chance to see it?" Saves me so much time knowing whether it's a me-or-them issue.
How is it garbage? It's crowdsourced monitoring so sure, there will be false positives (especially when aws/cloudflare/azure/bgp services have a bad day), but it's one of the best indicators to quickly know if _something_ is going on.
not really, soon as i had a problem with outlook i went there and already saw user reports and a massive spike confirming it wasn't anything on my end.
As someone who ends up being unofficial downdetector-primary at a company, dealing with this shit and the fact that people cannot comprehend its mis-attribtion wastes so much of my time.
At the other extreme is Microsoft's own dashboard (https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status) whose methodology is so "rigorous" that it probably won't show anything about today's outage until next week, if at all!
My housemate texted me saying our internet is so slow because outlook wasn't loading. So I think lots of people associate email not working with entire internet not working..
With how many people are unable to associate a "broken" monitor with an unplugged HDMI/DisplayPort or power cable, it doesn't surprise me that most people would not make a disctinction between the "internet" and "Outlook".
This happens every time there's an outage. People see their email not working and go there and mark everything as down regardless of whether it is affected or not. There's nothing wrong with Gmail or AWS or Cloudflare or Facebook.
All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.
This is going to bring about a huge move back to local servers and local software for offices, as many people are unable to correspond or use Microsoft software right now. I am glad I refused to move our small office to 365, even if it meant sticking with older versions. I could have probably moved everyone to Linux and open-source software, but as the tech guy in our office, I didn't want the extra workload of dealing with all the support.
I've yet to see a great replacement for Excel outside of gridcraft. Things like Libre CAN do it, but there's a lot of pain, and the average excel user isn't going to get over most of those hurdles without a ton of hand holding.
> This is going to bring about a huge move back to local servers and local software for offices, as many people are unable to correspond or use Microsoft software right now
One can only hope. But I am not so sure. No one seems to want to employ a local sysadmin these days.
There are plenty of mom & pop businesses that just need someone to setup their computers, network them, and ensure they're not being infected with shit. You'd be surprised how many people struggle with email, documents, spreadsheets, a printer, and maybe an app or two.
Think of yourself as a blue-collar contractor providing services to white-collar people afraid of being taken advantage of. Your competitive advantage over Geek Squad is being the local IT person who knows the names of everyone in a five-person real estate or law office.
Word of mouth will take care of everything else for you.
This year has been terrible for outages, the European Google power outage earlier this year, the PHP stuff (although that's only tangentially related),the AWS outage in May, Cloudflare a couple times around this time last year, Salesforce.
I can tell you somewhat anecdotally that people who usually forget about this stuff are starting to notice.
It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.
> Current status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
Tbh I’ve been maybe mildly impressed by how honest the past like, 5 updates have been about changes not working / taking / resolved as expected. Would have anticipated less direct honesty for whatever reason. But also sadly comical in that I feel most engineers have been there and know the feeling, and also holy moly it’s been an issue for a while!
EDIT: with the most recent one it seems they might be moving backwards …
> As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
The forced status updates come from the idea that resolution is a linear and quantifiable process, like copying a file from here to there. The idea an issue is caused by the unknown, and the remedy is unknown, is incompatible with processes and worldviews.
Forced status updates are still good. Even if they just say "we are still working on it and attempts so far have failed" it keeps people from thinking Microsoft is just playing GTA VI instead of working on it. Managing expectations is just as important as restoring service. Sometimes (probably not with a global email service) even more important. You can get away with a lot of downtime in some services as long as you are communicating what's going on
Maybe the execs went home, so its the lower-level people approving the updates now and they just want to get it out and get back to trying to help resolving the thing.
> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
Maybe problems with the Microsoft 365 Substrate that they dont like to talk too much about, but uses Microsoft Exchange code base to store copies of data that is exposed in higher level services. Some of Teams data is stored there (you cant get at it from Exchange) but not all. It also is involved in retention and other stuff used in Purview.
My knowledge of this isnt great, but I remember being given a briefing on some of this years ago.
Curious nobody allows for the possibility this all comes as result of some adversarial action on behalf of … potentially so many actors, and given the recent streak and stream of CVEs discovered with help of LLMs.
So my bet is if this is in any way AI related - perhaps the reasoning should go the other way around and is not mere dumbness of otherwise great company everyone’s buying like crazy for years now. Even my diehard Apple fans friends own MS stock.
> Curious nobody allows for the possibility this all comes as result of some adversarial action on behalf of … potentially so many actors, and given the recent streak and stream of CVEs discovered with help of LLMs.
For what it’s worth, the latest status updates from Microsoft address this concern: “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
Abscence of evidence vs evidence of absence notwithstanding, it’s probably best not to overly speculate.
I think the "at this time" is important, they were probably more focused on bringing everything back rather than doing a full investigation. I'm curious about the post mortem.
Microsoft employs enough people that they can afford to have one team scan for unusual ingress/egress traffic patterns while others work on troubleshooting. If not, they should not be shedding 60k employees right now.
Looking at MS' track record I'm confused why anyone would assume a malicious 3rd party first while Microsoft has been "trying to turn it off and on" again for hours.
GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?
> Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
The speed of change has accelerated drastically at some organizations, so even if quality stayed the same, the number of outages would increase because of the # of changes has condensed to happen over much shorter time frames.
A layoff of any real size has negative impacts to their unemployment insurance premiums and restricts their ability to file PERM for employees. Meeting those targets with voluntary separation prevents those impacts.
That’s not entirely accurate. Washington State pays unemployment, not the company. The state funds unemployment by taxing payrolls, but it’s much more indirect than most people think.
Claims do affect the rate they pay next year, but the company isn’t “on the hook” for you personally, at least not any more than they are for your social security income.
I think both parties probably benefit; people who are more likely to take the offer are those who have another reason to leave (unfulfilled, etc). This will benefit the company in the long run because they can eventually replace them with someone who want to join (people applying for the job).
Can go the other way though: people who've been there for a while, are motivated and back themselves to get another job will take redundancy (i.e. the people you want to keep).
People who aren't motivated and/or don't back themselves to get another job will stay (i.e. probably the people you want to get rid of)
You can at will fire but that doesnt stop lawsuits. Most of these require signing docs to get the payout. It is a way to cut cleanly and derisk the cut
The fact that it is always Big Even Number shows how stupid it is. Imagine if it was serious like "23.5176%" then you'd know they actually did their homework on leaning up operations instead of just cutting off limbs and seeing if it can still walk or not.
Everyone that is a whole stack programmer (say, kernel to webapp) has seen just how unnecessarily complicated everything has become. Watching it burn to the ground would be a pornographic miracle.
anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again
I did a 20-year stint in IT security (quit when my company was bought by a capital fond that wanted us to still do all the things but preferred not to pay wages.)
I still don't feel qualified to guess what happened here - since I know next to nothing about this incident.
But darn it, it's not like we have anything else to do...
So here's my wild (emphasis) guess.
a) Lots of organisations have an "allow any" hole in their firewall for ike+ipsec, usually for reasons like "that protocol seems complicated, firewalling it would be complicated", more or less.
b) There used to be botnets that could pacify routers with modified GRE datagrams, specifically the "Mirai" botnet, operating from hijacked webcams (doesn't exist anymore afaik).
c) New botnets have surely emerged, and improved on the capabilities, maybe building on the publicized source code.
d) Just to give a random example, the "Proxynvader" botnet hijacks TV sticks; assessments vary but some experts say a quarter million, some say up to 8 million devices, each capable of delivering 0.1 Gbps into a volumetric attack.
I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine one of those botnets grew the capability to spoof fx. ipsec datagrams, and that someone out there decided it would be fun if Microsoft's server parks started spending more time on fragment reassembly and decryption and less time doing whatever Microsoft thinks those servers should be doing. And then began blasting them with traffic on fx. 4500/udp.
(So in this example, traffic is routed around the normal ingress path through load balancers, tls offload, etc. for those servers, hitting them directly on a public IP via a permissive firewall rule instead.)
I think my odds of being correct are about 1% :-), since little is publicly known yet (and I personally know much much less than that.)
I enjoy reading the other theories here; some very interesting ones!
Haven't given much thought to motivation, could be anything. (I guess having an impact on the equity price means there's theoretically a profit to be made though.)
The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"
Updates below in reverse chronological order:
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:
Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Potentially impacted services include:
- Exchange Online
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.
More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:
- Outlook on the web
- Messaging API (MAPI)
- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API
Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.
Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC
---
Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.
Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.
Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).
That was never the promise. The nearest to that is the promise of multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, but neither of those have anything to do with outages of specific Microsoft services.
The "you can't possibly have better redundancy in your on-prem" was absolutely a sales pitch I heard to move to Microsoft 365.
The biggest site I work for, who went M365 hybrid last year, has incurred more Exchange downtime today than they had all of last year with their on-prem Exchange servers.
The service has redundancy, better than individual operators could provide on-prem. From the customer standpoint though, the service as a whole is a single point of failure: it either works or it doesn't.
It sounds like you are talking more about product reliability of M365 than you are about enterprise infrastructure reliability. M365 is a Microsoft product. M365 has no bearing on the credibility of cloud infrastructure as a whole, which is what your original comment spoke to.
YEah, that is not loading, along with the root status.cloud.microsoft , which MS links in their Xitter update [0]
What MS has posted so far:
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
12:54 PM · Nov 12, 2026
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
>> Microsoft 365 Status
>> @MSFT365Status
>> 20m
>> We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
if the admin center is not available to you.
I’m at a large general business trade association meeting today. It’s definitely caused a prominent buzz. The impacts of this in terms of lost productivity are pretty huge. Yes, the controller can still work on the proforma, for instance. But he cannot easily share it with outside parties. And he can’t search his email for relevant records needed for the work.
I've only ever dealt with Exchange at small scale, and even then it was fiddly. I can't imagine what it takes to fix something like this at a global scale with the world watching.
That kind of depends on what you mean by "Outlook".
Sure, the program on your desktop computer is fine, but the Outlook app on your phone routes everything through MSFT's servers, so you may be impacted. Outlook.com is running EWS, so it would be down as well.
And finally, if you're talking to a layperson, they're not going to know what Exchange is. They just know they opened Outlook and it isn't working.
"Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss."
I mean, either roll back your update or there is a malicious actor involved.
The 4:11 AM UTC update claims no indications of malicious activity (obviously I have no way to judge that, just copying it here):
Current status: As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious activity. We’ll continue to apply learnings towards remediation actions as we confirm effectiveness mitigation actions.
Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.
I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.
Haha exactly. Common pattern all over. I'm sure they're exceptionally talented execs but they seem to have a common theme of overseeing expansions off shore which can't be a coincidence
> "Milken said earlier that if a US company replaced the US-born CEO with a CEO born in India, he buys the stock.
> The first thing they start doing is cutting US jobs and offshoring or automating them."
"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."
russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru
Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
7:52 PM UTC:
We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC:
We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC:
We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC:
We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
That's a very painful lesson in "the cloud is just someone else's computer" to a crowd that normally are exposed to ideas like "software and IT are not our core competency"
The idea is that it's someone else's computers that are managed more comprehensively than you could reasonably do yourself. But if you choose Microsoft to provide such a service for you, I don't know what to tell you.
To be honest, Microsoft has much better chance of actually achieving that (almost) 100% uptime than your company's own IT department self-hosting things.
If the self-hosted email infrastructure goes down, roughly one company is deeply affected. When Microsoft's server goes, entire industries and governments will simultaneously be unable to conduct business as usual.
From the individual's perspective Microsoft might seem like the better choice if they can achieve higher availability, but the societal cost is so much greater when the one basket you've put all your eggs in breaks, even if everyone holding their own egg on average results in more broken eggs per year.
I like to dogpile on M$ as much as the next guy, but this feels like a heavy strawman.
> I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
At no point is "keeping people alive" mentioned. Businesses use email for everything. Businesses usually don't care about where their email server is hosted. They just want to send emails. They shouldn't have to care either. I don't put blame on a business that happened to choose Outlook, one of the largest email providers, to host their email.
It's a shame there isn't a well-standardized, free and open protocol for delivering email that could be run on inexpensive modestly provisioned hardware.
I mean, they made us take down our departmental run email (presumably postfix) and forced us to make them aliases to university-wide exchange (with crappy support for open source mail clients no less). So I don't think my org is Innocent here...
Of course they're innocent, but many business also can't afford nor want to employ people to host something like an email service for them.
I'd rather Microsoft host it for me than have to maintain a team of people with Microsoft Exchange skills running either on a cloud environment (similar issues) or on my own infrastructure.
I for one don't miss the days of Exchange going offline or having issues and being the person having to try figure it out.
Microsoft has much better reliability than MOST companies.
Amateur hour at Microsoft.
It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.
It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.
In other words, a day that ends in "y".
My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.
For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.
I'm in a similar situation, using Microsoft again after 13+ years. Outlook and teams I expected to be garbage, but Word and Excel was really surprising. I get it that everyone has that one feature of excel that is not available in gSuite so they need it. But UX in general is so much superior at Google it's baffling how they let it's workhorse fall behind so much.
It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.
> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.
My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…
Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.
While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.
"While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior."
At this point Microsoft should just throw in the towel and replace Exchange Server with postfix or something. At least we know those tried-and-true FOSS products work.
Claude wants me to reauthenticate my session... by sending a code to my Microsoft email. Also signed up for Zoom since Teams is down... and it wants the code from my email. Suddenly I miss passwords.
For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.
I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"
I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).
Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...
Exchange has been a circus for years. I think that's why everyone went O365 in the first place. Managing to have a paid up configuration where you go down when a cloud provider goes down but you're hosting it locally is absolutely stupid and I am laughing my ass off here.
Also laughing at our ops guys who are now absolutely helpless and have people phoning them. I warned about this on our risk call and it was seen as low probability low risk. I hope it's down for a few hours :)
I don't think many orgs are using "new Outlook" to connect to on-prem Exchange because you miss a lot if you're only doing it via IMAP and "new" still doesn't support on-prem Exchange any other way. So all my clients are using classic Outlook with their on-prem Exchange servers (and really if they have EXO too because new Outlook isn't very good).
It's been gone-as-a-default for a few months now, but for a long time, "Classic Outlook" aggressively offered a one-toggle upgrade path to "New Outlook", and it got used.
Sure, "New Outlook" on Windows is still entirely broken (including stuff like, oh, re-ordering mailboxes), but on Mac it's actually quite usable, and even allows you to switch off the IMAP proxying.
Actually it works just fine because it only uses the back end to sync between devices. I was puzzled why mine said "last synced 8h ago". Only realized why when I saw this thread.
Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.
A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.
Azure communication services (ACS - transactional emails) also appears to be down. Quite amazing one thing can roll out and break so many Microsoft services at once.
Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.
>Previous status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
>Current status: As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
Here is my completely baseless conspiracy theory. This is a Reichstag fire event to seize control of the AI industry. We will be told that the outage was the result of a sophisticated AI enabled attack, probably involving rogue agents. Only the oligarchs will be allowed license to operate AI for “national security” reasons. Jensen Huang being taken off the board is just too convenient of timing.
'In October 2026, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) making approximately 27% of its global workforce...'
So..
> Be the last standing SRE at Micro$slop
> Your mentors have all left, taking the exit payout, now your days are the best b/c you answer to nobody and can hide in your mountain of markdown.
> You knew each of the 7 different products named CoPilot are used to monitor your performance. So you set them all up talking to eachother, burning tokens and API limits.
> You are team top performer now, you get all the important decisions now
> You walk in the office this morning, CISA is sitting at your desk, with CVE-2026-124194 on your whiteboard
> 'You have a patch for this right, China is actively exploiting our Defense primes..'?
> Oh no, I haven't landed a patch in prod since my mentor left (because he actually did most of the work)
> Oh well, must be close enough, LGTM, CISA seems upset so better just yeet this to prod...
> ...
inb4 this is more accurate than anyone wants it to be.
Since you posted a link to my local public broadcaster, I wanted to point this out:
> [Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke] says the government has activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft today to ensure Australia gets priority:
> "That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this across everything.
It's a little pathetic-seeming to plead for special treatment from Microsoft. I get Australia is an important strategic alliance* for the US, but unless these resiliency agreements are rare... what meaningful prioritisation of "Australian interests" can we expect from MS?
*a useful staging ground to field subs into the South Pacific and Indian Ocean
This complexity and lack of MS to find the root of their own problems reminds me of when spacex had a falcon 9 blow up on the pad and it took a lot of intense investigation as there really seemed to be no trigger. They even suspected a shooter. I think it ultimately ended up being due to odd behaviors with super cooled helium.
Or maybe ai broke containment and it’s doing this for the lulz.
The cognitive dissonance is infuriating.
We're automating all and every software job, then this BS happens, and they're out for almost a day.
Where are all the agents that would work without breaks to fix this is no time.
Bunch of AI-psychotic CEOs ruining all that's been built so far.
Disgusting.
GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]
Three 9's is .36525 days per year. So if this one is resolved within 8 hours, that's about .999 uptime. (assuming they only have one such outage this year.)
Prescient comment as the Outlook service disruption enters
its second day. (Though to be fair, I hear most everything
is up, just possibly a little slow.) They can still go for
another day and a half and claim they have two 9's of
reliability.
Nah, no way they're getting rid of their M.C.-Escher-esque 'Forefront' mail-disappearance-machine-that-nobody-in-Microsoft-seems-to-understand-or-control, but, yeah, even their Internet-facing infrastructure seems unhappy:
451 4.3.2 Temporary server error. Please try again later ATTR2 [MI3PEPF00008486.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-12Txxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
It won't actually bounce until either gmail gives up on its retries (which generally is 24 hours) or the outlook server gives an explicit rejection (rather than a temporary error or timeout)
421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent connections per resource forest has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel. xyzxyzxyz.outlook.com. PRX8 [Name=InboundProxyTrackingAgent][AGT=IPT][MxId=xyzxyzxyz] [xyzxyzxyz.ausprd01.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T01:08:15.373Z xyzxyzxyz]
Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch?
Would they ever admit it if that were the case?
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
I want to believe that cause is that all the world's computing power is dedicated to calculating the incredibly large balance in my checking account but my desire is the only thing I can find to support that hypothesis.
It is basically nothing once you remember the cloud isn't one computer either. I want to say Azure was already millions of (beefy ass) severs over hundreds of datacenter locations organized into dozens of zones, and not all of those servers in each region are assigned to the same sets of services.
6.9 Tbps to get it done in a single day is even 3x less than the minimum on Steam in the last 48 hours https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ and they don't even have GTA VI to distribute.
Why would this be the case? Games preloading has been a thing for many years. This isnt like an MMO launch that there is additional impact when the game is being played.
Sure GTA6 may be a slight uptick in the amount of data being downloaded like any new game being released, but I would wager that the amount of data they are normally pushing out for downloads just on a regular basis (wether new purchases, redownloading games, game pass, etc) is already quite high.
Ex-MSFT here, sharing my outdated POV based on working on a product that was using Microsoft Exchange and therefore was hooked onto the email delivery pipeline.
Note that the infra for M365, Azure etc is different. They would be running on servers hosted in MSFT DCs but have completely different CI/CD pipelines. M365 services have their own deployment pipelines and it takes on the order of weeks to deploy your changes to production.
Considering the fact that Outlook is down, clearly email doesn’t seem to be working. So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it to run the cloud version hereby called M365. Email is one big “macro-service”, if you’re running Windows Server, look at the process called “EdgeTransport.exe” this is responsible for sending/receiving email on Windows Servers. There are probably multiple 100s of services supported by 100s of teams that are run while email is routed from sender to receiver via MSFT Exchange servers. My recollection is that even if one of these services goes down or introduces latency in the pipeline, it caused a major incident. When I was working in M365 Security in 2024, this Exchange Server pipeline was called “legacy” because it’s one big .NET Framework service. I don’t know if they upgraded to .NET core but developing on this was as HN comments say, very janky.
The reason Teams doesn’t seem to be down is that Teams services are completely different and are written using .NET Core and have their own separate release pipeline. It was much easier to interact with Teams services. I actually worked closely with the team that was responsible for ingesting Teams messages to the customer’s data store. Their code base was much more modern and easy to understand. Exchange Server not so much.
I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
Story time over.
"So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server"
Is this what it feels like to be old?
To test our code changes, we would check out a VM that was running Microsoft Windows Server edition which was a beefy VM that was running Exchange. It was a carbon copy of the server running in production.
The Exchange code base frankly was a behemoth. No one had a full understanding of how it worked E2E. I am just sharing how I understood it. I was only a lowly L63 btw.
Explaining Exchange to us older folks is like explaining an iPhone to younger generations. :p
As an aside, I worked on Lotus Domino—IBM's competitor to MS Exchange—before it was sold it off in 2018.
>Lotus Domino
Oh, the memories. That login screen with the changing hieroglyphics [1] is forever burned into my mind.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080220070921/http://lotusnotes...
> The hierglyphics on the left of the dialog box are supposed to distract someone who is peering over your shoulder trying to learn your password as you type.
lmao... but is it actually random or is it a hash of your password to make sure you typed it correctly?
iirc, its a hash with server secret. The idea was you can tell if the dialog is the real one, not just some look-the-same dialog from random malware
email is red until it’s read, and then it’s not red anymore.
why did Lotus desktop download emails only every 15 (?) minutes?
I remember people phoning to say "I"ve sent you an email, press the manual refresh button to get it faster".
up to this day I ask if companies use Lotus and those who remember just shake their heads
All email was like this at one time. In the 90s we were told to expect emails to take a few hours.
If you want immediate response use IRC or actually phone someone.
If was like this because it was designed before networks were expected to be fully connected at any one time. Mail would hop its way towards its destination as intermediate nodes dialed in over modem to upstreams.
It was like that because each check/send process was pop3 call that looked more like processing a queue of work for offline clients.
Now it’s more like being subscribed and listening for events.
The transition from POP to IMAP was a big step forward, back in the day.
I had email at my house, in the early 90's, over a UUCP feed. It polled every 4 hours.
I still manually check for mail. I don't want distracting notifications popping up at random.
Think about it in context. Polling constantly would consume a non-trivial amount of both bandwidth and server resources. 15 second intervals would require 60 times as many very expensive servers to handle a certain number of users as 15 minutes would.
And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.
Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.
This seemed a little hard to believe but it sounded like it was more of a replication where it was downloading things into an offline mode where you then write your emails and send them back again period. Other email clients might do this as well if you're running it on your desktop.
“Domino” just seems like a really bad name for a server/cloud product. The memes! The analogies!
Don't frame it as a negative. This is what it feels like to know things that other people don't know.
Is being old a negative?
It is neither a positive nor a negative.
As my dad would say, it’s kind of the point. Being old is better than the alternative.
Statistically yes, in terms of personal health.
60 years after birth you're either old or you're dead, so not too bad.
It’s interesting how relative this is, reading by the comments and stories around them. A previous coworker started computing in the punch card era and would tell stories of dropping your stack of cards and having to reorder them, using the printouts to debug, and so on. And helping develop what’s now known as fork() for processes (although it predated fork and he had his own name for it), and helping develop a commercial RDBMS before they existed all in a non tech industry career.
So when I read about Exchange Server to me it still feels quite modern.
My father has told some stories about waiting in line to run punch card programs and people dropping their stack and becoming flustered about it. They're funny to hear and mentioning it because this is the first I've ever heard it mentioned elsewhere.
I doubt it has something to do with being old, running an email server of any kind, let alone knowing how email works, let alone using email, have been all various abstractions to help make users into consumers who pay more than people who know how to build and run this infrastructure.
If that’s all you’ve got, I’d probably scrub this and keep your NDA intact.
This is common knowledge. Try googling EdgeTransport.exe and you should see the outdated documentation for Exchange Server on-Prem.
If it takes weeks to get some code into production, I understand how AI can enormously speed up things. Yes, AI can be fantastic but if people claim 100x increase, something else is majorly fubar.
I don't know what OP means. The deployment pipeline takes weeks or the release process?
The latter is probably the case for most enterprises.
Getting releases deployed into the testing environments, much less production, requires coordination, testing, reports and sign-offs.
Of course this can normally be expedited or bypassed for incident management and critical fixes.
we seem to be unable to start new chat sessions with people we haven't chatted with internally before. so team is at least partially down.
I suspect that the search is broken because it relies on the exchange bits to find users.
Did search _ever_ work, though?
From the Health Status page:
"Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels."
Teams relies on Exchange API to autocomplete your search for colleagues, if you know someone's full email you should be able to start it that way.
> Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it
After many enterprise customers refused to migrate Exchange Server SE exists since 2025 and will be supported until at least 2035.
Though given how the quality of their updates are going one could still say that it's "not supported", but at least they are charging money for it!
There's Skype for Business SE too. They've recently brought back the group chat feature.
oof, here in Ireland outlook still down this morning. teams seems to be there tho.
Yep, same here from Germany.
I guess when you do the math that's Microsoft 364, and counting down :\
Ok but why would all infra would go down everywhere, at the same time? Is it all a big server? Are there any Architects left or is it all Golf Players?
Microsoft product reliability has been a running joke since the company started launching products. Why would anything change just because they pivoted to managed services instead of shipping install media?
It’s a distributed system with thousands of servers with automatic update distribution and config change distribution. Bad changes can propagate across the entire system though Microsoft status updates say they didn’t see any change that seemed relevant. It could also be a bug across all the uniform code that somehow triggered. For example Cisco BE servers once had a firmware bug that after 32767 hours the fans would all run at 100% speed.
This hasn't been the case for a long time. Unfortunately there are micro services that can still bring down the system if there's a bad enough bug. That's not supposed to be able to happen as updates roll out over a period of time. Unfortunately you can still get bit if another update creates a bug that takes out instances faster than they can be recreated.
I would hope that enough hardening has happened over the last 20 or 30 years.
All the MS memes today made me realize people still use Outlook?
I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s.
In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does. Who are these companies that still use it?
Every non tech company uses outlook, basically.
Many, many big companies do, and some universities also moved to MS365 when Google downgraded their free campus agreement, because they were already paying for MS365 for Office and that came with cloud storage and outlook.
Most of the Fortune 500?
Probably all of the Fortune 500 except some of the tech companies.
Completely agree. Teams and Outlook is the de facto standard.
It's not about outlook the mailing app. They called their SaaS e-mail Outlook, you can use it without using Windows, in the same way as Gmail. Pretty popular in the corporate world
It's interesting what kind of bubbles people live in.
Sounds like you live in the Silicon Valley bubble. I don’t have a stat but I would wager that most businesses (especially larger ones) run on outlook/exchange.
You have probably mostly worked for tech companies where business employees were not the primary workforce. When you think about it most other business generally have everyone needing a word, excel or PowerPoint. It bundles cleanly with the whole package.
Windows is still by far the most popular OS for employees at big companies. Using Microsoft's SharePoint/Outlook/etc is also extremely common.
I'm assuming your "surprise" isn't genuine.
A large majority of companies I've worked for over the last 30+ years used Outlook and Exchange Server, or now M$365, for email, even in those cases when my actual work was on Linux. The exception were those that used Gmail...
> I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s. [...] In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does.
Yes, then you probably at least work in a bubble.
In my experience, it's more common than GSuite in most companies outside of startups and big tech and is ubiquitous at schools, among many, many other entities.
Of the ~40 companies I work with on a daily basis, 40 use Outlook.
I’ve worked at 2 companies who used Google for email and calendaring but still relied on O365 (one of the many naming incarnations) for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Microsoft really do have quite a mindshare foothold in the office productivity market.
Last big corp I worked for had a half-half setup of Outlook for email (and you were reminded that messages are retained for 7 years) and used Zoom+Slack instead of Teams (it was disabled, so not even an option), but we did use Sharepoint.
You are absolutely living in a bubble. The vast vast majority of US companies are using both Windows and Outlook.
I’m with you. I took a job in finance at one point, reporting to the CTO. On the first day they showed me my desk, a windows machine. I had not used it since high school, and not seriously then. It just never occurred to me that you would have engineers use windows (all the trading systems were Linux).
The CTO had to pull a bunch of strings to let me run Linux.
What is driving me nuts is that we still heavily rely on email. Even to the point were we are unable to get notifications other than that.
I work at a fortune 500 company and they got me, 3 hours after I started working , the basic info about the obvious the internet is already screaming at you.
Since we are responsible for a large web application I tried to reach out to people through VIVA (yes, we only make use of that) and we managed only to reach about 2-3% of the user base. Information-wise it's like a blackout. For living in 2026 this is completely unacceptable.
Email has been quite robust over the past~ 30 years. Exchange is just email by Microsoft so of course it'll be more brittle.
> What is driving me nuts is that we still heavily rely on email.
That itself wouldn't be a problem - email is very decentralised.
The problem is that we thought that putting like 2 companies in charge of most email communication is a good idea.
amin to that!
Yeah I don’t think anyone wanted that, we just ended up this way because it makes spam control more convenient. Without spam, email is incredibly simple to self-host. I suspect it may have ended up one of the most common services for companies to self-host.
What’s worse is how many things force an email second factor now. No choice to make a TOTP or to use a passkey (which, with biometrics securing it, is two friggin factors at once, and should be all we need for anything that isn’t nuclear secrets!!!! Sorry this just kills me with every SaaS product I have to “two-factor” to daily).
Your email is down? Cool now you can’t log into anything.
Meanwhile we were very happy that we mainly rely on email. We were still able to send out urgent messages (like "sorry if we don't reply, Microsoft is down, you can reach us by [phone] or [backup email]") via SMTP and if we really needed to receive some email, we'd be able to set up a secondary MX record to a holding server in about an hour.
If we were mainly using Teams or whatever other "better than email" service and that had an outage, we'd actually be in the dark!
As the resident complainer about Microsoft lock-in, I was honestly quite surprised by how well we could work around this. Don't get me wrong, if it was Entra that fell over, we'd be thoroughly fucked, but Exchange wasn't all that bad.
> So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it ...
On-premises Exchange is still supported and licensed. It's a subscription instead of a perpetual license.
> I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
Exchange is a mature product (albeit not without its flaws). Its era of change was between its 2007 and 2013 versions (inclusive) when it was made more modular and many parts were ported to the .NET runtime. The 2016, 2019, and now Subscription Edition codebases were more of an evolution and has much less churn.
Exchange should be well protected behind a firewall or 10 after all these years.
What this leaves is a comparison of whether on-premise exchange servers have been compromised or down compared to the cloud.
Microsoft will still charge you money for Exchange SE, and occasionally release security and other bug fixes, but “supported” is an extremely generous description of the state of the product.
Realistically, though, when it comes to support that's every MSFT product unless your org is shelling-out support dollars in advance.
The difference with their other products is that they generally want you to adopt it, and they actually do feature development, neither of which are true for Exchange SE.
My take is they want anything on-prem to go away.
Exchange, in particular, is sort of "feature complete" to me. I'm happy w/ what it does and how it does it for the most part.
I see Walker and Texas ranger running around screaming ANARCHY?
All I see today is middle managers using an e-mail outage as an excuse for not getting things done yesterday.
Pick. Up. The. God. Damned. Phone. And do your job.
I'm not a middle manager and in general I agree with you. But I tried to log in and it sent a code to my email. Whelp... I'll do what I can I guess.
Copied this from my post in the other thread:
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
9:02 PM UTC: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
Previous status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
8:52 PM UTC: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
Not really a big deal, but it is presently 8pm UTC time. I'm curious why their RSS feed seems to be 2 hours off?
Ah no that was a mistake on my part! RSS Feed was in EST and I misremembered the difference
They are turning it off and on again. I don't even. If this works, our industry is cooked as the kids say.
In maintenance, sometimes the dumb solution is the best. The servers that ran amazon.com had a memory leak and were subsequently restarted. This hack continues for years because it was the most cost-effective thing to do.
Put another way, if they didn’t turn it off and on again, I would think less of them because that’s the first thing you should always do unless you know better
I suppose you might want to first rule out a break-in, and if there is one, recover evidence that won't survive a reboot.
Yeah, a place I worked at years ago had a cron job to restart some critical service at midnight because it leaked memory all day. That was there for years.
Another real world example: to this day, it's a good idea to limit requests per PHP process using the MaxRequestsPerChild(apache)/max_requests(php-fpm) config option to some sane limit. After that configured number of requests, the PHP worker is terminated and restarted to... "fix" memory leaks. I remember setting that in the late 90s on Apache...
I am happy to no longer use PHP for anything.
Oh, it's been a while but I remember that.
I've used PHP in two previous jobs and certainly the stuff that I was in control of had it set to 0 because we made sure we didn't leak memory. Other departments... I'm sure at least one had the limit set to something non-zero.
We had a mail server that ran on an old DEC minicomputer. I rebooted it every six months because it had a slow memory, or possibly resource, leak somewhere.
It was the only thing running on that box so it wasn't a big deal to reboot.
I worked on multi-million dollar airplanes. If a pilot called me with an issue and hadn't rebooted the plane (on the ground), I wouldn't even talk to them. Rebooting isn't always a bad solution to technology.
It's not a bad solution, it definitely should be tried. But I'm still rather shocked to see it in official notes, especially this "late" in the timeline.
It's not a solution at all. It's a symptom.
It’s not a symptom, it’s a work around until a more permanent fix can be deployed.
> it’s a work around until a more permanent fix can be deployed.
If it "fixes" your problem, then you didn't fix you problem you identified it. It's another symptom of a bloated industry that can't or won't innovate, and I think it's more "won't" than "can't."
For example, we still can't patch running Windows, and most of the information technology professionals I know are still convinced it's impossible. Billions upon billions of dollars in time have been lost, probably enough man hours to send men to mars several times over.
Yet, you can just buy a version of Windows Server that already does it. It's not only possible, they already have the code. They just don't care enough to integrated it into the product most people use.
(on the ground) is probably pretty key, though. Ha ha. I can imagine the conversation if this was in the air.
Rebooting is also the only solution for some problems.
looks at the Boeing 787
If they rebooted it, and it started working again, would you just walk away? Or would you try to figure out why the fuck it needed to be rebooted in the first place?
Thales or Collins or Honeywell or whoever provided the system would. The technician at the airport would only follow a procedure listed on a checklist, which probably includes rebooting the system.
Ironically there have been a fair few cases of aircraft incidents where components were reported as bad by pilots but the issue couldn't be reproduced on the ground and "it worked" after a reboot and self-test so they just kept using it (with this cycle repeating multiple times). Often there were clear physical problems (cracked solder joints, stuck microswitches, broken insulation) that were only discovered after a catastrophic failure but could've been discovered with a more inquisitive engineering culture.
I would argue a "just reboot it" culture leads to more problems -- engineers should be empowered to diagnose problems before they become catastrophic. In the world of software we even have mechanisms for extracting data from failed systems to root cause them later, and yet most people do not take that step before "just reboot[ing] it".
[1]: AirAsia 8501, Lauda Air 004, and SmartLynx Estonia 9001 come to mind.
Right, rebooting only really makes sense if you understand why the reboot is going to fix the problem. As in, corrupted volatile state is reasonably fixed with a reboot. Any hardware issues or persistent state problems could well get worse.
The following is a few decades old --
A physicist, an engineer, and a computer programmer are driving down a steep mountain pass when the car’s brakes fail.
The car speeds out of control around sharp turns, nearly flying off the edge before they miraculously manage to skid to a stop at the bottom.
Shaken up, they discuss what to do next:
• The physicist says: "We need to calculate the friction coefficients in the brake pads and model the temperature rise to figure out why they failed."
• The engineer says: "I have a few tools in the trunk. I’ll take a look underneath and see if I can fix the mechanical failure."
• The programmer says: "Why don't we get back in and see if it's reproducible?"
But these intermittent failures lead to delays and worse. The sheer cost of repeat events leads to action. If deferrable at all the standard troubleshooting is mostly remove and replace. The repair and reliability processes identify these rogue units fairly fast and the actual rates of that in a well functioning airline are very low.
Yes, I remember a flight that sat at the gate past departure time, the explanation to the passengers was that some essential piece of equipment wasn't functioning, they had tried restarting it, and it was going to be replaced. About 30 minutes late, we were on our way.
The vast majority of the problems were a system that missed the time window to report it's self test. A reboot got things in order.
It was a small fleet, so we had a pretty good idea if the same problem kept popping up so we could look more into that system.
A few fault codes were well known enough that if you called with that one the answer was to shut down and find a hotel, you aren't going anywhere and no reboot will take care of it. (bad detectors in the engines for about 10 years until a redesign)
Yeah. It works, almost always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesia_AirAsia_Flight_8501
I was thinking of that one as an example of why we don't do it in the air...
What makes sense for something that is used for 20 hours at a time is different from what makes sense for a service that literally has "365" in its name.
In rail, we call it BOBO - battery off, battery on.
In German, we say "AEG-Effekt", ausschalten einschalten geht wieder.
Amateur hour. Everyone knows professionals say "power cycling" instead to make it sound complicated.
the layman understands both of those words and their meaning together.
we "bounce" the servers when on calls with customers.
Powercycling is a designed method to bailout Cisco routers. If you botch a configuration command and lose connection, you can have someone powercycle it to restore you last good configuration. Its not just a joke it really works more often than I'd like to admit.
~25 years ago I was a firewall administrator, and the Cisco PIX we used was notorious for gradually running out of memory, effectively cutting off the entire company from the Internet when it went down (and it was a very big company).
We absolutely should have scheduled reboots during off hours. Lessons learned.
Absolutely bizarre wording of these updates. Strangest corporate speak with urgency turned up to the max.
copilot, make this doom and gloom situation sound better. assume you're using the voice of a friendly but intensely focused sysadmin. use only neutral language.
So the servers are ok but many of the health checks are failing and so the servers are taken off rotation, increasing load on other servers. I'm sure it's more complicated than it seems but from my POV this looks like amateur hour at Microsoft.
At Microsoft every hour is amateur hour.
Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll get better after they layoff 60,000 people.
Don't worry, their replacements will receive very clear instructions instructing them to make no mistakes.
I'm not thrilled with what they've done to Windows lately myself, but this is just rude.
You know a lot of talented people who work there also post here, and it's not fair to insinuate that they aren't talented because some vastly complex system somewhere in the world had a bad day.
Stuff happens, things break. That's why lots of nines cost a lot of money. It doesn't automatically mean that anyone is incompetent.
i agree with everything you said here except the last part.
lots of nines means not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
Lots of nines means they have SLAs of no significant downtime. It does not guarantee that the SLAs can never be missed, just that there will be consequences when it is missed. Lawyers and accountants and sales folks will sort out the compensation payments that come back to the customers and try to negotiate relationships back to a healthy state.
That’s purely a choice by those claiming the nines. I’ve worked in companies selling software with more than 6 nines uptime (so that we can be more confident about the 5 nines). Not 4 nines uptime plus some money back for the other one.
Stuff happens and things break everywhere but right now at Microsoft they break badly and often, that points to actual issues.
Almost certainly not the fault of individual people, it's a management failure of course
When was the last major M365 outage?
There are lots of talented amateurs. What separates professionals is standards, quality, teamwork, etc.
I agree there are many talented people at Microsoft, but I don’t see the professionalism in this incident.
Individual talent is irrelevant when you have a company culture that rewards the opposite of that. Any talented person working at Microsoft knows that they are dealing with structural problem that force MS products to be massive piles of shit. There isn't much an talented individual can do about that.
An organization can become fundamentally opposed to the purpose for which it was created. Organizations simply don't follow the same laws as the individuals inside it do. A company can be made of geniuses and be totally ineffective; it can be full of talented go-getters and be completely unable to fix problems.
Satya sock account found
ButtSlut5099, the finest detective since Sherlock Moans.
I realize I'm responding to somebody who isn't paying much effort, but still…
Isn't that comment saying the direct opposite? If it's a cultural problem, its precisely Satya's fault for not fixing it; that's the executives' job.
I was confused too, but I said hey, it's probably typical buttslut5099
The enshitification of Windows was not technical incompetence; it was intentional product direction.
They transformed Windows from a useful OS to a banal surveillance and advertising platform.
Microsoft's superpower has always been hiring smart people and making them work under dumb management to create flimsy, mediocre outcomes.
I'm not actually sure this is true anymore. It seems most of their talent has left.
A few weeks ago I saw a clip of a lady walking us through a day at her Microsoft life.
Between breakfast, 1-hour lunch, 15-min ice cream break, 30-mins chill, 30-mins foosball games I think she worked 4 hours max.
At that point she caught some flak since it was timed with the layoffs. And I get that is not necessarily representative of the MS culture…
… but talk about timing and poor choices!
Copilot hour!
The people writing these updates are very obviously not technical and are least one step removed from the actual work being done to fix this.
To be fair: I want the people who can speak most competently to a problem to be working on it versus writing commentary. Those highly-technical people can shine in the postmortem report.
I disagree; the communication aspects - including external - are a hugely important part of any incident response. IME the biggest challenges in these situations are the many levels & combinations of communication and coordination. You don't need your best DevOps person doing it, but there should be plenty of competent technical product managers or engineering managers who could do this well.
And how do those product or engineering managers get information on what’s being tried and what is being discovered without slowing down the process of fixing the issue?
Microsoft is not a small startup where the CTO is getting pulled into firefighting.
They should have established procedures for large-scale events, and they must include a coordinator whose entire job is to manage the external and internal communication.
And that is a good thing. Well, maybe not good. But the last thing you need in a crisis is to pull people away from fixing the problem and make them type up status updates. Admittedly, having tech knowledge would help the writers - a technical incident management team would be better. But ain't nothing wrong with letting the PR folks write up words while the tech folk work on problem solving.
Actual tech write-ups can come later.
Amateur hour? Not sure if you've lived through one of these cascading failures, but they are hard to design against, hard to load/chaos test for, and hard to recover from. The key is that this is a dynamic load, not a static load; and it's normally amplified by uncontrolled retry behavior by clients.
In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
Many of us insist upon not building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about precisely for this reason.
Most of the time we get demonized by resume-driven developers job-hopping every few years (seems like the lack of deep expertise is working out). Today we get to laugh at their expense. These problems were entirely foreseeable and avoidable.
> building Rube Goldberg machines that cannot be reasoned about
What a great phrase!, can I use that in conversation?
Isn't a complex computer system, at the lowest levels, an example of a Rube Goldberg machine ?
If we could see the memory bits and the CPU internals, I think it would be good candidate, particularly branching and branch prediction.
There are methods for building complex systems our of smaller pieces. Humanity has done this forever. An internal combustion engine is very complex. An airplane is very complex. You put a boundary around your system, you build it to a spec, you test it to a spec, you define the behaviour across anything you can see. When two engines fail on the airplane it can maybe still at least glide. Maybe there's an ejection seat. Because someone is doing the system thinking with some level of discipline.
A brick is very complex. A bearing is complex. A bolt and a nut and a washer are complex. An integrated circuit is complex. We build stuff out of that. Like buildings that don't fall when you sneeze on them.
In software we use duct tape - at best. But that's not just Microsoft, that's pretty much everyone. With maybe few exceptions.
Software systems are by nature more complex than physical systems. They also lack any tangible interfaces beyond code and diagrams and collective knowledge in the minds of the humans who build and maintain them.. The rapid evolution of software is no help either..if anything AI is accelerating that rapidity as well.
In my experience it is always the "business" people that do not want to take the time to do it correctly.
Except for the fact that it seems like most Microsoft outages are self owns. I'm not sure how many times we've had outages due to bad deployments that somehow made it to their global infrastructure and only got noticed when customers notified.
Plenty of internal accounts from previous employees highlight this.
To be fair to Microsoft (and I'm having trouble believing I just wrote that), the vast majority of everybody's outages are "self owns". If you don't change anything, you're not going to break anything, and major external events (fires, cable cuts etc) are rare and can usually be worked around.
I have lived through and debugged cascading failures and large scale distributed systems.
The problem is amateur hour is the entire industry. Nobody specs anything, nobody tests overload conditions, nobody thinks failure modes. The stuff that every engineer does when building anything else other than software doesn't happen. The orgs are bloated. Too many teams. Too many silos. Incentives are stacked the wrong way. People are motivated to not think about systems but stay in their lane. Responsibilities are split in weird ways.
Yes. Big systems are hard. But we can build, manage and understand big systems with the right approach and people. Even one computer is complicated and many people get stuck trying to debug a piece of software running on one machine. At the end of the day it's not magic. All of humanity is big systems but when I have a power failure the power company is generally able to understand why and resolve it and the water in my tap doesn't stop flowing and the cell towers still work (generators, who would have thunk).
A friend who is really good had to leave Microsoft because of how AI was pushed. Before that he was telling me some other stories that make the culture seem pretty not great. Heard similar stories from other people. It used to be a great place filled with great people until at some point it's just another big company.
I'll be the downvoted comment, since HN doesn't like to hear this, but the other flavors of engineering do stuff we don't because they're regulated.
My bet is we'll eventually get there. Planes kill people when they fall, software used to not be as dangerous, but it's been a while since it became critical infrastructure.
> My bet is we'll eventually get there.
Given that people on reddit claimed that in the entirety of New Zealand no real estate transactions can be settled, causing cascading failures [1]...
I think this might actually be the incident pushing governments to designate large online services such as MS 365, Gmail et al as critical infrastructure and force companies to massive, yet-unseen levels of transparency and regulation.
The EU is already itching to act ever since the Trump admin forced US Big Tech to terminate service to the ICC judges, and this here was a square own goal for Microsoft.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xus565/comment/1...
The other option is to not outsource everything to the cloud. Yeah, it is more convenient ... but in these times, being a bit more self reliant is not a bad thing.
In these times, paying more for that is not an option. Servers with lots of RAM are 5 times what they cost a couple of years ago. Cloud is a huge bargain today compared to running your own infrastructure.
I can't think of any other engineering discipline where demand might increase by a factor of a million in a few seconds because some DNS record was propagated incorrectly or something - regulation won't magically solve the issues unique to software. Maybe it's doable with vastly increased costs (a classic would be running fully redundant 1:1 warm failovers, which nobody could economically do at the cloud provider level.)
That's not to excuse incompetence or whatever, just to note that the benefit of software is precisely how easy it is to change, which will always lead to more problems.
Electrical engineering of the power grid has the exact same failure mode: cascading failures of interconnected power grids can cause loads to increase by factor of a million in a few seconds.
I remember a power outage in 2003 that knocked out power for 55 million people and took over a week to restore in many places.
Also known as *the* blackout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
Note that buggy software was a major contributing factor! The software was designed to, and would have, detected a deteriorating system an hour before anything broke, which would have provided ample time to intervene. However, a race condition caused the whole monitoring system to display stale data and then crash, including the redundant backup. This wasn't the only problem by far, but it was one layer of swiss cheese.
Also note the power companies have clear procedures to reboot the grid, known as a "black start[up]". And they test these procedures, though without taking down the grid.
Which is the kind of exceptionalism that really creates these problems. Software is the only industry that allows people untrained in running global infrastructure to run global infrastructure.
So why do other global systems have massive failures?
> My bet is we'll eventually get there.
Until the cost is mentioned. People love free or nearly free software.
i think it'll go the other direction with vibe-coded software.
The problem is that you are only as strong as your weakest link. At some point, something somewhere will be architected poorly and it will one day line up perfectly with 2 other bugs that were incredibly hard to predict and then you're stuck in Microsoft's current situation.
Also, power grids are a poor example. There's been multiple instances of absolutely catastrophic failures so hoity toity capital E Engineers also make mistakes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
We took some of the hardest problems in computer science: distributed systems, scale, concurrency and networking, and made them the standard for every To do app.
This is the inevitable consequence.
When I look across the scale of all the failures that have occurred in big tech over the past few years, my self-hosted solutions have been cheaper and more reliable. They are simple. They are small. They are easy to fix and diagnose. Because they're not trying to solve all the world's problems.
I think scale is the keyword there..
People expect software to be feature rich, complex and solve all the world’s problems. And if you don’t do that, the vibe coded competition will beat your cleanly architected product commercially.
Indeed, it's an expectation problem, and it's even worse in higher management.
It's not even better though. It doesn't have more features because it's a distributed system. It isn't faster because it's a distributed system. Maybe it has a bit higher uptime but nobody was paying too much attention to that anyway, except when it's down. And it's much better for your PR if, when it's down, it isn't down for everyone at once.
Users don't expect infinite features.
Managers and marketers are the ones asking for all those useless features. And god forbid they run out features to ask for, because then they start asking for architecture v2.0 projects.
This is the same as what's been happening with entire industries: Build for the critical path. Eliminate redundancies. Eliminate resiliency. Lean staffing. Just-in-time manufacturing. Single-vendor mandates.
In the name of efficiency and profit, we have stripped away all the safeguards that should prevent cascading failures after the first domino falls. Anything that doesn't return profit now, today, every day, must be purged. Because what if that domino never falls? Then you wasted your money! Think how much you can save if you don't need to make backups! (And every dollar saved is a dollar in my pocket!) Etc.
And torben-friis is right: the only solution to this, demonstrably, is regulation. Require multiple vendors for every major component. Require staffing sufficient to cover a third the company being on vacation. Require resilient systems, that can take a single disaster and keep on trucking, because they are the backbone of our economy.
Regulation will just make a bad situation worse- complicated things rarely get good regulation.
The best defense against cascading failures is limiting the blast radius, which is something AWS seems to do well but Azure does not.
From this we can tell where Jim Roskind works.
How did that AWS DNS incident go recently? Unplanned outages are unfortunate but common, and hubris is the problem when everyone assumes that they (or their pet vendor) are immune.
Exchange Online and Microsoft 365 in general doesn't run on Azure.
so, Bedlam 4?
We learned the hard way that there's a very non-obvious inflection point in large distributed systems, where the your design needs to change from accommodating load resiliently via queueing, auto scaling, and such, to a posture of actively scaling back certain features and even shedding load when in a defensive situation.
It's really not intuitive, and at least for me, the need to admit that we couldn't just comp-sci our way out of some conditions was painful.
This sounds suspiciously what occurred when I was working at a large motor sports company. We had a major release of new year models coming out on the website. The deployment went super smooth and then in about 30 mins the site was crashing. Since we were a huge MS client, almost everything we ran was all MS top to bottom.
Site was taken offline, war rooms ensued. 48 hours later, an Ops team from Redmond was flown out. Another three days and they determined it was several legacy servers were going down and the load balancing servers were getting hit so hard, they also failed. It was a cascading effect that killed everything.
CIO was pissed. The company got absolutely lit up on every social media channel for their ineptitude. The CIO vowed it would never happen again, they were upgrading the entire network and infrastructure to avoid it happening again. Fast forward six months to the next major release. Same thing, same panic, same cascading failures because servers were collapsing under the traffic to the website. Another war room, another Ops team flies out. Two days later they figured out it was some buggy code that was causing it.
This after 8 rounds of load balancing testing to the tune of 10X the amount of traffic the site sees on these major release dates without so much as a hiccup.
I left two months later, but the overall feeling was the same - total amateur hour from Microsoft after our company was gifted major discounts to go all in with their hardware & network gear. The company found out the hard way it wasn't a smart decision.
The scary part was this some 20 years ago - seems like not much has changed considering how frequently Github is down now too.
Newest update says that wasn't the issue after all. They say relatively small loads are actually causing servers to become unresponsive and have to be restarted.
They still don't know why this "core process" is maxing out the processor for no reason.
I'd start with "what has changed" but surely they've looked at that.
Could be something adjacent - the last time I majorly blew up a release was because something had changed (which was fine) but it caused a list of items to be broken over two pages, but only in prod. Me and a team mate were scratching our heads for the longest time because "what had changed" was quite mundane itself.
The classic 'database is smaller in testing than in prod' problem which is responsible for some outages IME. Often the 'query was not optimised but that didn't show until prod' one.
They did look at recent changes but none seemed to be related, but it turned out recent network changes triggered a failure mode in a much older network change. Dependent or cascading issues remain hard to diagnose or find.
There was an article posted by a former MS / Azure person earlier this year that described the dumpster fire of node management and their cloud control plane
https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...
HN discussion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242
Azure is still humming along working fine.
I can't stand it when I see armchair analysts making claims like this.
I'm sure it's more complicated than that.... but from my POV, which is extremely limited and informed by what others online tell me.... that this is amateur hour
What would it take for it to be professional hour?
Professional hour would be invisible. Outages don't happen because they were anticipated and prevented.
You can't do much to work around nuclear war or a major asteroid strike, but keeping important things working under normal operating conditions should not be a high bar.
They rolled back the 7:52 UTC update to the 730 one now....guess it didnt work
This is like getting transmissions from Cassini before it falls into saturn.
Why is there not a single mention that this could be a cyberattack? Is the issue only affecting the USA?
No, my family is in Europe and Australia and also seeing it.
I can connect to US account services, but while first VPNing through France, rather than directly from US.
Nope. Europe (eastern) for sure included too.
UK seeing it
Brazil too
I work for a global company, it's affecting every single of our 50+ offices world through US, Europe, Asia, Middle East, etc.
Because there's no indications that it is the case, at least for the time being.
Australia affected as well.
Japan is also seeing the issue. It is probably a global issue.
It doesn't look like a cyberattack at all, talking about fixing health checks and the like looks much more like broken automation.
Impacting us here in Australia, our company is having fun today.
Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.
> Don't attribute to malice that which can be explained by DNS.
Perhaps more accurate in our world.
How would that help.
The issue now is fixing this so status of what happens is needed and not how it happened in the first place.
The cause will ans should only be published when the issue is fixed and reviewed.
Or a training run gone awry?
Cortana, play My Heart Will Go - oh.
This thread is now complete. We can all go home now.
I feel bad for the people working on this. It sounds like desperation is increasing.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
From the 9:41:46 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
From the 9:01:14 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly. We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses. Additionally, our review of recent changes has identified a small number of configuration updates that we're investigating as potential contributors to the issue.
From the 8:44 PM UTC update:
Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
Previous Status: While we haven't identified any recent changes that correlate with the start of impact, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component on the affected servers that's responsible for processing them. We're deploying a targeted change to bypass this component on a subset of servers to validate whether this restores availability, and we've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being removed from service while we work to return the affected servers to service. We're also investigating why affected servers are experiencing elevated processor usage while handling requests.
they are furiously typing at their agents hoping they can figure out what to do. Getting glimps of hope everytime claude says "I found it." only for their hopes to be crused at "Turns out ...". The clown show at Microsoft is surreal.
I suspect that they are not. Copilot is also down :O
That's why your parent said "their CLAUDE" ;)
their employer brought me agent swarms supposed to take over my php-serving machines. whatever this is, I don't feel sorry for them.
So the thundering herd wins again
Ugh. There's some yahoo from NewsNation on WGN Radio right now saying this is because of the Chinese, and obliquely linking it to Nvidia.
Reddit-level speculation.
My girlfriends work she is hearing this from office employees. Kind of scary how much the public gets wrong.
and what evidence do you have that they’re wrong?
What evidence do you have that they're right?
This is 2026, why are we asking for evidence?
gp confidently claims that people are wrong but no one really knows for sure, i doubt they would publicly announce that it’s a cyberattack yet
Working in reverse-chronological order here:
From the 1:06:17 AM UTC update:
Current status: Our investigation has found that a process on the affected servers responsible for establishing secure connections becomes overwhelmed, causing the servers to stop processing requests. We're preparing a configuration change to address this behavior that can be applied across all affected servers, and we're validating it on a subset of servers before applying it more broadly alongside restarts of the affected infrastructure. In parallel, we've begun reverting a recent network configuration change that correlates with the start of impact and are monitoring to determine whether this contributes to recovery.
The temporary traffic limitations we previously described are now in effect in specific locations. We're monitoring the affected servers in those locations to confirm whether they remain stable while handling a narrower set of connections, after which we'll gradually reintroduce additional traffic.
---
The list of impacted services just grew tremendously.
From the 12:56:09 AM UTC update:
Features of the Microsoft 365 services below that interact with Exchange Online and email services are impacted. Elements of those services that do not depend on interaction with Exchange Online remain functional.
- Exchange Online: Users may be unable to access their mailbox using Outlook on the web, Outlook desktop (MAPI), Exchange ActiveSync (EAS), or REST-based connections, and email delivery may be delayed.
- Microsoft 365 admin center: Admins may be unable to load some admin center pages.
- Microsoft 365 apps: Users may be unable to view their recently used files.
- Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center: Multiple services including Cloud Update, Cloud Policy, and Inventory are affected.
- Microsoft 365 Education: Features including Assignments, Reading Progress, and Speaker Progress may be impacted.
- Microsoft Copilot 365: Users may be unable to load Copilot Chat or receive responses in the web and desktop apps, and Copilot experiences may be unable to access work data such as email, calendar, and files.
- Microsoft Defender for Office 365: Safe Links may be unable to verify URLs, which may impact users clicking links in Outlook and Teams.
- Microsoft Defender XDR: Users may be unable to load Microsoft Defender portal pages or solution tabs.
- Microsoft Fabric: Users may encounter failures when exporting reports with sensitivity labels to PDF or PowerPoint, or when updating artifacts with sensitivity labels.
- Microsoft Graph: API requests that access Exchange Online data, such as mail, calendar, and contacts, may time out.
- Microsoft Intune
- Microsoft Planner: Users are experiencing Plan and Task operation reliability issues.
- Microsoft Purview: Multiple Purview services including Authorization, auto-labeling, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Communication Compliance, and Data Classification are impacted, and users may be unable to load Microsoft Purview portal pages.
- Microsoft Teams: Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including calendar, meeting scheduling, and creating chats for organizations using Information Barriers, may fail. Core messaging and online meetings remain largely functional.
- Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
- Power BI: All users may intermittently be unable to export reports with MIP sensitivity labels to PDF in Power BI.
- SharePoint Online: Features that depend on Exchange Online may be impacted. Accessing files stored directly in SharePoint Online remains functional.
- Universal Print: Users may encounter errors submitting print jobs or using admin features.
- Windows 365: Customers who have configured their tenant and Cloud PCs to use Microsoft Purview Customer Key for Windows 365 Cloud PCs may have users who are unable to connect to their Cloud PCs.
Current status: We've reviewed known impact scenarios and have revised the list of impact services and features, which can be viewed in the "more info" section of this communication.
We're continuing our work to isolate the issue affecting server availability, as well as other workstreams.
---
So much for seeming hopeful.
From the 12:08:53 AM UTC update:
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
Hopefulness continues, I guess?
From the 2:14:51 AM UTC update:
Current status: We're applying infrastructure capacity improvements where possible in an effort to help support traffic in regions coming online. We're continuing to monitor the results of changes applied so we can identify strategic actions that can help to improve service health across all affected regions.
---
Hopefulness returns.
From the 1:50:27 AM UTC update:
Current status: We're seeing positive results with our efforts to restart affected infrastructure. We're actively monitoring the performance of these to verify stability which will support improved availability. Remediation actions will be expanded as we confirm stability with the changes applied.
They've tried turning it off and back on again, now they're moving on to identifying strategic actions that can help improve service health.
This doesn't sound like hopefulness, it sounds like somebody's huffing hopium. It sounds like somebody's who's all out of ideas, but there's no direction to go but forward.
Sounds like nobody knows how their own systems work anymore.
While I think it's a bit premature to jump to "AI is at fault", and I will emphasize that I appreciate Microsoft's transparency in their status updates, these updates do have much more of a "we don't know what's going on" feel than any other major outage I can think of.
It's been hours, and the status updates still feel like there is an undertone of frantic panic (understood if you can't determine the root cause). When I think of past major outages, they may have been down for hours but usually folks knew what the root cause was relatively early, even if remediation took some time.
I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
The email outage gives me time to order popcorn off Amazon for the inevitable postmortem in a few days. I hope it's a good one!
AI is at fault for what seem like some of the most vaguely worded outage stuff I have seen.
I think this has to do more with their calculating SLAs for uptime than anything else. Once they have a root cause and start deploying a fix they can "stop the clock" on the outage, even if they don't get to your tenant right away.
Imagine the amount of money they're losing right now in credits that will have to be applied once this finally gets resolved.
> I wouldn't be surprised if AI coding and release pressure was a primary cause, so I really hope the future post-mortem is made publicly available.
If nothing else, increased change volume will mean the number of candidate diffs ballooned, possible to a level where non-AI review is impossible on incident-level timescales.
Coupled with each change also being AI-documented and the relevant teams having less hands-on understanding of their own changes, so going to the pushing team and asking "Tell me about _____" isn't an option.
You can be surprised because it (apparently) had nothing to do with AI or release pressure. It was a combination effect of two separate network changes.
E.M. Forster says hello.
https://americanliterature.com/author/em-forster/novella/the...
thanks for this. Just read it for the first time. 1909 hits above its weight!
Nobody has ever fully understood how their systems work. Thinking largely about "systems as imagined" and "systems as found."
Richard Cook wrote about this years ago, and it's always going to be relevant:
https://highscalability.com/designing-for-resiliency-will-be...
https://how.complexsystems.fail/
> Nobody has ever fully understood how their systems work. Thinking largely about "systems as imagined" and "systems as found."
But with AI, now we can have systems that no one has understood ever.
"Everything went down, trying to bring back a subset of things gets killed by thundering herd" is very common.
See also the electrical grid.
Betting the electric grid has people around who at least understand how their substation works.
It doesn't matter if large portions of the grid go down at once. See the recent Spanish outage - the coordination of bringing it back on line is an art of its own.
For the curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
This is so true. Not making excuses for Microsoft, but OP’s at this very hard. What would have been a “reboot the server” at small scales becomes a concerted operational nightmare at larger scales.
It's very common, but typically teams test things by having a staging instance which also has staging versions of all dependencies.
They then deliberately loadtest it to failure and check it can be bought back under control.
The staging pattern doesn't scale for systems this large and complicated. Everything is constantly in flux and changing. Ive worked on systems this large and we had something we called staging but it was a joke.
Gradual rollout, pilot regions and monitoring are usually how you avoid broken stuff becoming global incidents. Will be interesting to read what process failed here next week.
This type of loadtest I normally only perform ~annually in the companies I have done it. It's normally a ~2 week-long project for an intern to identify failure modes of any client side apps (ie. Retry loops etc), capture a sample of production API requests, create some fake data store either on staging or an instance setup specially for the purpose, adjust the request sample to hit that fake data (reads, writes etc), then replay the sample faster and faster till staging fails due to overload, and practice a recovery procedure with the load still applied.
If it goes well, redo it with different types of overload - especially large percentages of failure responses from various dependencies, or 1000ms delays added to dependency responses which tends to be one of the trickier things to recover from.
Typical outcomes from the work are patches to make the service more robust, fallbacks to not use dependencies or disable features when overload happens, on-call procedures for what to do or not do in certain common cases etc.
Why so? I'd have thought that in situations like this, one would limit inbound connections, either to certain IPs, or through rate limiting controls, all of which should be controllable at the router / network infrastructure level.
Even more so when dealing with a potential incursion (like servers compromised with botnet software that goes back to work not long after a reboot and slams the server and/or network.)
Some form of demand control is generally how you work around these problems, but maybe those parts are falling over too.
For really big services it's also hard to exercise these processes on anything approaching actual prod scale. Ideally you can chop the architecture into pieces where you can simulate region failure and ensure everything works as planned, and fix whatever you find that breaks with every simulation.
But maybe some bits of the architecture aren't amenable to being regionalized.
Reading the status updates feels a lot like watching some of the OpenAI models try to debug a thorny issue. Throwing half-baked solutions at the wall, then reacting in surprise when it makes things worse, getting increasingly detached from reality until someone clears the context and makes it start over.
Wonder why.
Nah, they're just debugging a hard problem while the world looks on! The 'normal' problems they have processes to work through, but hey emergent systems and all that - they have to expect the unexpected.
This seems like the same terse language/feedback OpenAI models give me and I leave more clueless than I arrived.
I hope everyone involved in working on this is staying grounded and relaxed and not suffering a ton of physical stress over what is ultimately the result of greedy leadership decisions :(
This needs to be amplified. A lot of the updates carry all the hallmarks of leadership consistently denying the engineering teams the time to build out sufficient introspective and troubleshooting tooling, on the finance-supported rationale that it is not financially justifiable for such low probability events regardless of impact. And this can be as simple as allowing for enough shadow non-Production environments real-time twinning inputs at scale enough to reproduce thundering herd issues, for example.
Take 8:52 PM UTC, for instance. "While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly." So many questions flow from this.
They jumped from "affected servers have become unresponsive" straight to "restarting these servers". No granular troubleshooting of a random sample of the unresponsive cohort to identify the precise origin of the failure mode. Possibly their own organizational chaos prevents the team at the low granularity layer seeing the pattern of whole groups of servers, from effectively interacting with the right team to troubleshoot at the individual server, high granularity layer. I've seen that at many of my clients; sometimes the different teams at different granularity layers don't even have established engagement channels for when things blow up across those granularity layers. I could go on, but you get the drift.
If you obsess over internal tooling, you waste time yak shaving and ship nothing; if you only care about shipping features, technical debt accumulates until a major outage hits. Because cutting corners for speed is the path of least resistance, paying down that complexity later is much harder than maintaining discipline upfront.
Everyone wants to blame the bankers and the bean counters. As I get older I realize that businesses will happily forgo insane sums in the name of predictability and continuity and that it's the team leads and the middle managers who don't want the troubleshooting and the control panels because those would provide an quasi-audit log that would more readily quantify bad management. They see these systems as a threat, a way for information of what's really happening to leak around their control.
Of course not all team leads and middle managers are like this but too many of them are and the bad ones are a great fit for exploiting BigCo environments so BigCos act like a catch basin for them.
The fact that they don’t report certain steps in their public communications during an outage does not mean those steps weren’t done.
I hope they all quit cause microsoft fuckin sucks.
Better than most alternatives.
Say what you want about OpenOffice it doesn't experience 24h degradation because some idiot pushed vibe slop to production.
Not to defend Microsoft, but the thick-client Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) worked fine during the outage. Nobody couldn't use Excel because of this outage. Outlook worked fine too if you were connecting it to an on-premises Exchange instance.
This was an outage of a server-hosted database for email, not an outage of desktop application software.
Sure. Just wait till it gets fully entshittified. With thin clients you can enjoy any MSFT fuckup as free time off!
Considering the middle management culture at MSFT and other tech BigCo's it's probably better that this be a huge public outage where their crappy managers will actually face some heat for creating the kinds of processes that lead to these outcomes rather than can throw the team under the bus when inevitable human error creeps into their obviously un-followable at scale over time process.
Day 12: It has been 3 days since the last ping returned, I fear I will not make it back to my family. Give my love to dear Liza.
I feel for those stuck in there. The outage going on for this long has got to be fucking brutal.
Why do you think this is a problem for Eliza?
She uses outlook.
The astronauts going to the moon reporting "we have two outlooks on the laptop here and neither work" will be funny for decades from now.
I though she communicated through RF emissions from CRTs and other monitors.
Gonna have to rebrand as Office364
Well done sir
We already call it Microsoft 356.
So just reboot shit
Nadella stripped mined the company for AI jank, and everything has been falling apart. Github has been unreliable a lot lately. Xbox is basically imploding. A lot of Azure, Entra, Intune, etc. is shockingly janky, and there is clearly very little investment in it.
I’d imagine they are going to get a massive drain of whatever talent is left from their company wide severance as well.
We use Azure at work and it’s wild how much stuff is just manual labor behind the scenes on their platform.
Seems like it’s always on fire somewhere, ripe for burnout and MBOs aren’t aligned with reality from what I hear.
There are huge swaths of azure engineering teams that deploy things entirely manually via azure portal. Insane.
Maybe years ago but definitely not today. But nice FUD
How much of it is deployed with nondeterministic tooling, though?
I remember their customer-side push for semantically merging Office and some other suites into something-or-other like 365 or Copilot, creating enormous confusion. I have difficulty believing MSFT distinguishes between handmade and machine-learning tooling in that type of environment.
I suspect there's also a good amount of LLMs/Agents in the mix. They have been rechristened to Microslop for a reason.
There is nothing micro about the amount of slop. MacroSlop.
Even as recently as 2022 (when I used to work there), infra-as-code use at Microsoft was still very nascent and non-standard. Infra at Microsoft was mostly "ClickOps", with a ton of tribal undocumented knowledge about the right order to do things, changing the defaults, and things like that.
The amount of times we've had to reach out to an experienced person who had transferred to another team/org about processes in our team was ridiculous.
> We use Azure at work and it’s wild how much stuff is just manual labor behind the scenes on their platform.
AWS is no different. Everything is on fire all the time, but customers usually don't notice.
That means AWS is doing it right, though
Or just not as badly.
at something AWS scale something is always on fire, they probably measure disk head crashes per second, and they're supposed to insulate it from their clients with layers of redundancy. If those layers are working, they're doing it okay.
Above those layers is a ton of jank, e.g. Elastic Beanstalk. But my understanding is the fundamentals on AWS - compute, storage, networking - are pretty much rock-solid.
Fair.
Can you clarify what you mean? Do you work there, or have you had negative experiences as a customer?
Disclosure: I work at AWS, at the core EC2 dataplane for many years now. We monitor our production environment very aggressively with tight SLAs that page us at night, and our technical leadership is competent as well.
The petrol in a four stroke internal combustion engine is on fire all the time too. The important part is nobody notices.
What is MBO?
Management by Objectives?
(Although I like the idea of Management BuyOut, too.)
I read opinions like those but then I worked with Azure at previous jobs a lot and never had any really big issues. On the other side, I just tried using AWS for a small Saas of mine and after setting up SES, I got a shady email, from non-defult support amazon domain that I need to send them scans of my personal documents. Link in that email was blocked by uBlock Origin, domain was not the same as other emails, not a single notification in AWS Support Console anywhere so I ignored it as phishing. Got suspended two weeks later, not a single human in sight within 48 hours of me making a ticket, I just gave up and moved emails to Cloudflare. If I had actual real clients at that phase I'd be pretty pissed. I genuinely don't know how people blindly trust AWS with everything these days, it's 2026 and there's still not even a hard billing limit built into AWS.
I will never understand people crying about MS and Azure when AWS and GCP support are 10x worse. At least Microsoft usually has decent docs and support.
Hardly, Microsofts docs will actively lie to you on functionality and features. Even pointing claude at them will run opus around in circles realizing it's not concrete at all.
If the docs are correct I'm sure they'll depreciate the offering and rename it to something else and leave you on an island either way.
> I worked with Azure at previous jobs a lot and never had any really big issues
to what extent, though? over the course of my working with azure, ive been disappointed constantly, by just about every service i've used. things that should work a particular way don't, and when you try to investigate you end up in a maze of out-of-date and/or totally wrong documentation. i've started a project before, followed their precise "quick start!" guide to the letter, and find it totally non-functional and wrong.
things that DO work end getting updated (often due to financial incentives) and break, or shuddered entirely. some values that you might want to change for certain services are hard-coded (which, to their credit, you can verify from their public github repos) for ostensibly no reason. a lot of their documentation is internal only, and the public facing stuff feels perennially out-of-season.
(opinion) i feel like fundamentally microsoft has embraced ai development so wholly because they've not been able to describe their services in documentation very well, and thus rely heavily on the ai's ability to digest what scraps of truth remain and the various source code to be effective at delivering output
I don't know exactly what's going on with today's outage.
But this is certainly exactly what I'd expect after indiscriminately laying off half your workers, then immediately offering a buyout to make sure any experienced people still standing will find their way to the door.
If this incident, or the difficulty they're having with remediation (update: holy shit, they still haven't even identified the problem), are somehow not caused by any of that, then it's at least a preview of what things are going to be like.
Microsoft has not layed off half of its workers: 2021-2026: +23% employees 2024-2026: -2% employees
What changed is the productivity per employee: 2021-2026: +60% 2024-2026: +38%
To be honest, I also assumed your take on this at first. But after a bit of research I found quite a different reality!
I'm sure "productivity per employee" is definitely not a daft vanity metric
In all fairness, Microsoft really did layed off low double digit % of workforce since 2022.
The total populace did not change, because it was replaced by new "talent".
You are right, thank you. I suspect they would have layed off people in certain areas to milk the cow, while invested in hiring talent in areas of growth. Still no evident correlation between layoffs and the current blackout incident mostly affecting the Cloud business.
So a few years ago Nadella was a God among CEOs capturing OpenAI at the right time etc..but yeah laying off thousands of tenured folks surely is great strategy, god I hate the tech industry.
Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
Yup.
I made the switch to Linux Mint and it’s wonderful and almost triples my battery life. I’m also in the process of switching to a phone with graphene os which runs like butter and feels so much more secure, safe and private.
Battery gains on laptops are insane. Swapped a month ago on one, still need windows stuff on the other, but same model and one last all day and one has to be plugged in each session.
and that's crazy because traditionally Linux would drain your battery faster because it was lacking all the power optimisations. It still is, but windows must've gotten so bloated it's worse now.
It's been three months since I switched to Arch. I've had a couple of hiccups that I couldn't resolve with an agent, or that I simply didn't want to spend too much time troubleshooting. Other than that, performance has been absolutely amazing. My terminal and browser open in milliseconds, not seconds. Even the heavy system I work on builds and loads in seconds instead of minutes. If I don't like a particular configuration, I can simply ask my agent to change it. Linux is GREAT in the agent era.
Loving Mint as well! Just switched a second PC over from win 11
I tried few distros including Mint but in the end CachyOS was one that works for me best. But I still got this W11 virtual machine where I can see how the system "evolves", and it still baffles me that Microsoft has the audacity to throw message saying "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" and having "Energy recommendations" that "Lower your carbon footprint" where background processes continue to drain machine resources at random intervals since W10
Oh man. Do not look at the Darwin source code with remaining eye.
Crappy as in doesn't need third party full access to all accessibility untrusted toold for stuff like mouse scrolling the currect direction, volume control on external hdmi monitors, being able to navigate the UI using a keyboard, having the computer staying running when connected to a power source, etc?
One has to spend more on third party tools for getting MacOS to feature parity with a windows than a Win Pro license...
Linux is fine on the other hand, but you compared to a joke of an operating system.
MacOS honestly feels like a toy OS for kids.
The nice part is that it’s just Unix with a decently stable (for a time lol) and professionally designed UI layer.
People use it every day to create and build stuff. That's always been MacOS's legacy.
>>Btw does everyone see how insanely crappy Windows 11 is compared to MacOS
This is just an anecdote, but I have the exact opposite experience. I'm a C++ games developer working on Windows 11 every day and other than the micro frustrations with stupid UI, the system just works. I know I can rely on it day to day. But I was also given a MacBook last year for our iOS ports and I don't understand how anyone considers it a serious operating system for work - it's full of bugs to a point where I started using AI to work around some of them. I thought maybe MacOS 27 would fix some of them and sure it did - but then it introduced a whole bunch of new ones. As a developer it's probably the worst OS you could pick - if you hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux, at least you have actual control over your OS compared to MacOS where basic things like spotlight are broken and there's no way to fix them other than add to the thousands of complaints on apple forums.
The Rot has set in at Apple, too
> hate windows for whatever reason go straight to Linux,
Honestly, for personal machines the M series is wonderful hardware, and I have young kids so no time to tune Linux (I ran it at home for around a decade or so).
But yeah, the interface has many, many bugs.
My "favourite" (new) bug is that sometimes you can't move a window from the laptop screen to another screen. It goes away if you full screen the app, but it's bizarre to me that it made it to production.
I develop enterprise SaaS apps, and MacOS just works for me, so I guess your mileage may vary.
Nadella's AI fumble is a true generational fuck up. They had OpenAI, they had complete access to GPT models before any one, they even had the first coding assistant concept.
Then due to typical clueless management and lack of taste and complete buffoonery, they just fucked it all up. I'm not complaining because I think everyone is better off, but it's just amazing to have witnessed that even when they luck out on a bet, they manage to fuck it up. Copilot started as a coding assistant, and before it could breath they destroyed the brand by shoving the name into literally everything without thinking or taste. Ignored the coding part, because that's lame, and instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use. Once claude code dominated the scene, they realized the major fuckup and tried to catch up, but it's too little too late.
Again, not complaining really.
> instead focused on half assed Windows or Office apps and integrations that no one will ever use.
I actually know quite a few (non-tech) people that love to use Copilot in those apps. So I'm not sure it's as big of a fuck-up as you think it is (or as I certainly used to think it is).
There are people who bought Cybertrucks too you know.
The Cybertruck was a success if it made a profit overall. So was Copilot. The point is to make money, not to make good products.
This mindset is what makes this society so depressing
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are profitable and useful. People prefer something that's expensive and useful over something that's just expensive. For some reason though it's only the people who are making useless things who are making anything at all. Nobody else tapped into the Cybertruck market segment at all.
I'm not really sure I'm understand what you're trying to say tbh. Though tangentially what even is the Cybertruck market segment to begin with?
On profitable products though; sure as a general concept, but the rate of return, opportunity cost and market competition factor into the profitability equation too. You could go waste your time building a desktop app for a chatgpt clone and make some "profit" in the same time your competitor threw similar resources at making a claude code and that makes 100x your profit. That would mean you actually lost despite the profit. The opportunity cost isn't only in building the wrong thing, but also in the human resources you allocated to the task that deprived other areas. I see no world where the 6 dozen copilots we got from Microsoft have any good ROI beyond diluting a brand and making them more of a laughing stock.
Hell no.
We need to rewire ourselves to think about things that are beneficial to society as a whole. Not "profitable." Profit just means more money going from the many to the few. That's what's gotten us into this awful situation.
What good is thinking about the most beneficial things to society if you and your faction will never have the power to implement them or even to persuade those who do have that power?
Well, one of the things that I'm very, very certain is beneficial to society as a whole is getting the fascists and those who think that profit should be the first, last, and only concern out of power now and forever.
So fortunately, there's not really an incompatibility there.
If the Cybertruck were making good money it wouldn't be getting canceled a few years into its run on the market. No car company does that to successful products.
I don't understand how basically everything has languished under Nadella. Apple doesn't sell MacOS, so it should be less incentivized to keep improving it, but it is way better than Windows and the gap keeps widening. If I didn't use MacOS, I would just use Linux.
Windows does always cater to backwards companility and making IT departments happy, so that explains some of the lagging technology and systems. I can't believe NTFS is still the default file systems. That's generations behind Apple's APFS.
The stock has popped, and that's what Wall Street cares about, but I could see a world where this chronic underinvestment and mismanagement basically implodes the entire company in the coming years.
Hadn't heard about Xbox, what's happening?
Massive layoffs and studio closures and mergers like Obsidian merged with Bethesda.
New Xbox to cost $1200-$1800.
Gamepass limited to 15 hours a month for Ultimate.
No, the Game Pass limitation is for _streaming_ the games. You can play and download as much as you want.
New Xbox cost is not confirmed.
Might not be confirmed but it was part of an article that MS approved of. They appear to be testing the waters.
I'm not a big gamer but unlimited cloud gaming seemed too good to be true to me. It was a self defeating product offering for Microsoft.
It works perfectly on a fast home connection over ethernet, mind blowing how responsive it is and load times are non existent.
But as far as I can tell most people subscribe to game pass anyway? Why buy the hardware at all when I can just cloud game in the same subscription. .
I suspect if the threat of AI cloning pans out as some say, we may see a sharp return to streaming - perhaps devs releasing on streaming platforms only - as an ultimate form of anti-piracy
Series/S costs 1000 Euros and Series/X costs about 1700 right now so it'll likely be even higher unless ram prices finally crash.
At least here in the UK, that's off by a lot.
Here, Series S is £400-£430 for 512GB or £500-£520 for 1TB.
Xbox Series X is £600-£620 for digital 1TB or £50 more for the disc version. That's much more than I paid for mine a year after launch (£450 I think), but luckily still nowhere near 1700 Euros.
It'll probably be an app instead of its own thing in the future. For Pluton-enabled systems only of course.
> Hadn't heard about Xbox
Indeed you’re seeing the consequences of their past decade+ of management
The sales have fallen off compared to the Playstation.
A quick google search turned up these global sales numbers: PS3 87.40 million, PS4 117.20 million, PS5 96.44 million. Xbox 360 85.73 million, Xbox One 57.96 million, Xbox Series X/S 35.68 million.
I'm usually late in getting new console generations (didn't care for paying for new generation premium), so I remember looking to buy an Series S/X a year ago and it wasn't anywhere, there was wild speculation about a new generation or those handheld things taking over.
It seems to be back in stock now, but at a cost of about 1000 Euros for a Series/S I'm not really feeling enticed even if GTA 6 is around the corner. They probably really shot themselves in the foot by not having units out a year ago and now fewer will buy due to pricing.
Well, speaking for myself, paying the new console premium for my PS5 turned out to be a decent deal given used ones go for about the same at the moment...
Their console is no longer their primary objective though, xbox live is where it's at - tons of people did the math, why buy a console when you can get a subscription with tons of games for 3+ years for the same money instead? It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day).
I think Sony is shooting themselves in the foot with the digital only consoles too - unless they maintain a very attractive set of exclusives at all times, people will just choose whichever digital subscription is best or cheapest for them instead of something tied to a particular console.
I think they've broken the trust with exclusives and don't think they can get it back quickly, almost all of the best PS4 exclusives that I can think of ended up on PC anyway. Exclusives won't be a factor for me when weighing up a PS6
Xbox Live subs are something like half of what they projected. This is why they are closing so many studios and laying people off. Xbox Live is not bringing in the money.
They need to sell consoles to get people to become subscribers.
They seemed to have backtracked on the no-console approach. In fact, their entire Xbox strategy seems to have flipped 180 in the last year.
Nothing to do with today’s outage though.
Xbox Live is the old subscription service, it has since morphed into Xbox Game Pass which is the monthly subscription to access a bunch of games (as well as online features Xbox Live offered before)
Xbox Game Pass was an attractive offer for consumers when MS was getting people onboard and the price was so heavily subsidized that it could never have been a sustainable model. Once they tried to start bumping the price into something profitable people immediately said "okay well that's clearly not worth it, I'll just cancel."
They attempted to make it $30/month last year before backtracking. At $360/year, even factoring in the new $70 price of AAA new releases and ignoring you can wait a few months to buy them cheaper, you had to be buying 5 new release games per year at launch just to get close to breaking even with the subscription price. 6 before you save money. So...
> It's a really attractive offering for people who don't play games all that much (that is, more than 2 hours a day)
No, it's absolutely not worth it for these people. Even at the current prices they backtracked to ($280/year if you want to play new releases on day 1), if you're a person who doesn't game that much, it's cheaper to just buy a few new games per year. If you're not a frequent gamer, why would you of all people need access to a massive library of games?
I personally have a backlog of 45 games I want to play written down in a note. And those are just the ones I wrote down. Most of these games you can get for peanuts. I just played through Fallout New Vegas for my first time. It regularly goes on sale for $0.99, or $5 if you want all the DLC. I got 90 hours of playtime out of that.
The idea any casual gamers should be paying for a subscription service to a Netflix-style game library is nuts to me. These aren't movies and tv shows you'll be flying through every evening, they're big games that can take weeks to play even if you're putting in a few hours per day.
OTOH, I couldn’t manage Entra without their AI chatbot. That system is a Lovecraftian stack of sadness built upon despair, of which mortals are not meant to know.
This really is the honest truth, every interaction I have with the MS platform is somehow worse than an actual dumpster fire. AI is the only thing keeping the ship afloat. Then again maybe that's the point?
I have the pro Microsoft copilot subscription at work just so I can search Outlook and teams since the native search doesn't turn up things when I search exact strings that are in the messages or use filters for other things like sender or recipient. Crazy to have to use an llm just to find an email
I'm so deeply perplexed by how bad Outlook search is
The "Advanced Find" in pre-2016 versions of Outlook was superb. Then it was "de-emphasized" for the crap search that followed.
Especially when they bought a superb product just for searching Outlook (LookOut), incorporated it into Windows Search and somehow destroyed it in the process.
Did you make the mistake of enabling the "new" (web-based) outlook? At least AFAICT, the "classic" one hasn't regressed much/at all
I used legacy relatively happily when I had a windows laptop, but recently switched to a MacBook and it either forced migration or was already the new version (don't remember). The macos outlook is a bit borked too. Beyond the typical level for outlook. Can't create or edit rules anymore that save to server. Need to go into the web version via browser.
Janky is part of the Fabric at Microsoft. I don’t feel like that’s new…
> Fabric
I see what you did there.
Fabric is a weird one, as it's sortof a GUI over spark, but also PowerBI and lots of weird services.
It feels like a "data plaform" for people who've never used one before and only have the vaguest idea of what it means.
That being said, Spark is pretty good and we're running a lot of workflows on it (and probably building more on top, I suspect that I'll be much angrier about it in approximately 6 months or so).
Entra And Azure are terrible.
Ui is clunky, they are terribly slow.
The only reason companies use Entra is it appears cheaper but eventually you pay as much as competitors. Okta is a way better IAM solution if you need one. Although it’s very pricey.
I am aware that the authentication subsystems have major structural problems which make finding things like exfiltration bugs in azure surprisingly common. I suspect the current incident is related. I'm hoping it's also caused by too much insufficiently supervised AI coding on poor architectural foundations, and that being caused by that will be obvious and hopefully become public. But that's just speculation on my part.
My take is the reason companies use Azure is lack of imagination. Like Service Now. Just horrible software, and thems that make the decision to buy it aren't the one's who have to use it.
Vendor lock in is always a thing really, you don't always get choice in SaaS providers and how they auth. Could of course choose another SaaS provider but then that starts reducing the pool, assuming you have alternatives.
> Vendor lock in is always a thing really
Yeah, and additionally if all your counterparties are on it, you can externalise your internal tools onto them relatively easily.
This mostly doesn't work, but it's a beautiful dream for executives.
After the last couple of updates on entra, where you keep getting the "loading dots" to just pull up is insane. I still use Azure or PowerShell to do the task by the time it can "load up".
I am surprised no executive used Copilot to type "Bring Microsoft 365 up. Make no mistakes".. should've been a quick task with SuperIntelligence!
You don't understand, the agents aren't fixing the outage because those human engineers didn't make the infrastructure AI first. The only possible follow-up from this is that the faulty infra needs to be completely thrown away in favor of the vibecoded replacement.
You had me in the first half.
I agree. All the execs need to do is tell Copilot to "fix this so that it never happens again. Make no mistakes" and run it on bypass permissions. Tada!
Fuck, thanks god I am retiring soon.
I'm sure they would love to try, but Copilot is also offline according to the status page.
Damn it! If only their Copilot was working! Outage resolved under 300 milli seconds!
Maybe they can use azure hosted openai models? Or are they down as well?
Just was a perfect opportunity to showcase astra and fable and other models
I believe it has more to do with him force-feeding Microsoft employees on A.I. resulting in slop code and outages.
If this continues the company will see a lot of customers leaving. And they were already in a bind since Europe is finally realizing that its dependence on American tech could be used against them. Luckily most European politicians are corrupt and can easily be bought to prevent them from ditching Azure and Windows.
> Luckily most European politicians are corrupt and can easily be bought to prevent them from ditching Azure and Windows.
They're not corrupt (in a lot of cases), mostly just ignorant. Like, they don't understand the tech, and microsoft is safe, they're already using it so handing over large swathes of their infra to them seems reasonable.
MS have wonderful sales people, and this is why they do well with governments and large enterprises.
There's also a co-ordination problem, in that all of your counterparties (like your citizens, for instance) are familiar with MS and therefore it costs a bunch locally to move, for little short-term reward.
This is actually a place where (good) regulation could derisk a lot of these changes, but you'd need a committed group of politicians who can convince the civil servants to keep at it. It'll happen, but slowly and in starts over the next 5-15 years.
I literally had a person from IT tell me “Firefox is open source so it’s not secure, that’s why we have to use Edge” the other day. They are beyond hopeless.
And Microsoft is being smart by cultivating this worldview. Open source has no such thing. In general, the company with the best marketing can be expected to win the market. Product quality plays only a minor role.
Microsoft also sells contracts to companies and open source does not. If "open source" does, it's someone like Red Hat who has to take on all the legal responsibility themselves, just like Microsoft does, and that makes the product as expensive as Microsoft's, only it's not subsidized by mass surveillance so it's even more expensive.
i had a very similar experience with a co-founder and ceo.
it took half an hour to even somewhat convince them that academic/postgrad student open source projects with one commit four years ago are not the same thing as linux/ubuntu/docker/etc.
sibling makes a good point tho. what they were probably thinking was “we want to be able to blame someone who is not us if it goes wrong at some point”. that’s 90% of the microslop business pitch right there.
open source, it’s on you. microslop, it’s on them.
Where does corruption start and lobbying begin? American cloud providers are hosting more than $340 billion worth of European workloads on their infrastructure, including email, videoconferencing, office documents and storage.
If they transfer this to sovereign providers it would cost Big Tech serious money. So they're quietly lobbying to slow down the speed at which European nations are moving away from them.
> If they transfer this to sovereign providers it would cost Big Tech serious money. So they're quietly lobbying to slow down the speed at which European nations are moving away from them.
Yeah, this is definitely really important to them (not important enough for them to comply with the laws, but whatevs).
> A lot of Azure ... is shockingly janky
This absolutely predates AI.
insufficiently supervised AI on top of poorly architected sales and marketing driven decisions looks like it's a good recipe for a nice warm garbage fire
In this case AI stands for Actual Indians.
Support in Europe has been nearly dismantled in favor of low cost countries. I wonder how they expect it to function now they it's basically third parties withan AI slapped on top.
Just shows that incompetence and stupidity still count in the age of AI.
Be that as it may, he will be remembered for his gleeful "I want people to know that we made them dance" (at the cost of falling over, themselves).
I think a lot of it is due to the deterioration of code quality due to widespread AI use rather than AI as a feature in the products.
Vibe coding has enabled unconscientious developers to pollute otherwise good codebases with a lot of sloppy code.
I essentially said this in a sibling post whose parent asked why it seems like nobody knows the codebase anymore except my post was immediately flagged.
I think this is the logical conclusion of using copilot to write your stuff for the last two years. Nobody knows what it does and more and more bugs are being solved by just pointing the AI back to it again. Combine with the fact that so many people have been laid off and replaced with copilot I'm not surprised that the few who remain aren't quite sure how to solve it
And yet, for some reason, we have to _prove_ this is the case, as though in the history of time, engineering something has ever proven ok as a careless endeavor.
Yeah, Frontdoor really hit me. Especially the continued status page lies.
What’s crazy is now hour 8 and my work email for 15k+ employees is still down. This is worse than the usual US-East-1 issues.
It's impacting all businesses running MS hosted Outlook, that would also include companies with 100,000 of employees. It's a global issues not just one area.
Well Microsoft made everyone move to managed exchange/outlook right? I was told you can’t self host anymore. How did they not design for regional resiliency?
What makes you think they haven't?
Issues that cause outages are complex and can cascade across multiple areas around the world.
Designing for resiliency doesn't mean you won't ever have a major outage.
Well, no one designs to not be resilient. Quality varies in practice.
My customers are small.
One of them has two servers on AWS behind a load balancer. That's the very least of resilience.
Another one has one server in a datacenter running their primary service on a single VM. That server had issues with RAM chips a couple of years ago that brought it down a few times. However they are not crazy. They made the choice to keep their data at home, bought reportedly good hardware, accepted there there might be consequences. They have other less beefy servers but they did not load balance their service on VMs on different servers.
I think that we can agree that this is no resilience. Is it by design as in "I want my service not to be reliable"? Of course not. Is it lack of quality in the design? Of course it is. But does it matter from the point of view of the users of the service?
I run several services on a VM, with no automation to restore them if there's a hardware issue with the VM host. (There is some resiliency: a managed datacentre, the servers have RAID, dual PSUs, dual network, etc.)
For over 10 years, this has not been a problem. We understand the risk, and know how to restore services onto a different VM host if necessary.
I think the more complex system (e.g. K8S) has problems when people don't fully understand it. We've had outages there, caused by misconfigurations or unexpected behaviour.
You design to the needs. I have resilience in my home DNS so I have a 100% availability bounded on the home (if the home is burnt down then I'll lose DNS)
At work I designed DNS to survive the loss of a city, so again 100% uptime. The riskiest part is deploying changes, which is why the deployment doesn't run in parallel and confirms state before deployment.
Resilience isn't hard when you aren't trying to serve a billion customers. The problem is we are addicted to a "winner takes all" economy, which leads to fragility. If Tesco breaks, I can go to Sainsburys, or Aldi, or Lidl, or Iceland, or get in the car and go to Asda or Morrisons. That's diversity.
But in IT the goal is all those follow the same gartner reports and all use the "best supplier" for their backend infrastructure, and if that supplier breaks then they can't restock any supermarkets.
That's a terrible risk and needs to be stopped, not encouraged. But the individual incentives are for the CTO of each supermarket to choose what the consultants tell them. If they don't they are accountable for the choice of not using things like "industry standard".
While it's probably true that no one specifically seeks to remove resiliency for its own sake, basically the entirety of our corporate world has, over the past several decades, been relentlessly redesigning everything in ways that remove resiliency. Because resiliency is almost inherently antithetical to efficiency. At the most fundamental level, if you want to make sure you have a backup of your data, that means you need at least 2x the amount of storage. And, of course, if you want to make sure you can operate even if a critical employee gets sick/is hit by a bus/goes on vacation, you need to hire extra employees.
And that's anathema to companies nowadays.
You can self-host, but it's a monthly subscription instead of a perpetual license.
Is there any proof that "self hosted" is still working, wouldn't surprise me if at least part of it relies on centralised services.
In a sane world the CTOs choosing this would be held accountable. The massive global economic fragility which is created by the centralisation of society is a massive risk. Diversity is important, we see it time and time again how optimisation causes panic, from crowdstrike to microsoft. When your outsourced provider is "too big to fail", you have a problem that government needs to deal with.
I haven't had occasion to spin-up Exchange SE yet, but I've read plenty of descriptions of other admins running it. I have no reason to believe Exchange itself relies on any centralized features. "New Outlook" has been alleged to use centralized servers even when connected to an on-prem Exchange SE install, and given that it's "modern" MSFT software that wouldn't surprise me, but anybody stupid enough to use "new Outlook" gets what they deserve.
Operational consistency is a hidden single point of failure.
US-East-1 is at least something you can kinda plan for / around. This isn’t.
Yet HackerNews soldiers on.
Can't take down simplicity this easy.
Yeah, with a brief outage, the concern is that you don’t have access. At this point, the concern is that someone else does.
They're still trying to find the root cause apparently. The status updates I've seen (the page seems dodgy, probably millions of people hammering it every millisecond) don't sound very optimistic as of yet.
Just tell copilot to rollback the last 24h of changes, ez-peazy /s
Really should ask: how badly designed is O365 if their AI can’t solve it?
It's the Great Rebootening. That's what they're trying apparently. Roll back and reboot and see if everything works.
Soon to be O364 :-(
Best of luck to those oncall.
Copilot is down, they might need to ask a Chinese model.
Windows Recall: You Can See Everything
Hey, at least they fixed the status page. A few hours earlier, it was loading a 16MB JavaScript file over 2 minutes or something. It's much faster now, though I haven't checked if that file is smaller, or just the pipe got better.
It's still loading a 16MB JavaScript file.
But it's loading a 16MB JavaScript file much faster! Improvement (not in the direction I like, but still)!
When I first saw this I commented it must be bad, but that was 4 hours ago after a whole day of "welp i guess i'm not emailing anyone and meetings are pushed.".
It's 7PM PST now and I cannot imagine how fucking on fire things must be for it to not only still be down, but basically with no real communication from what i've seen (like yes there's updates, but not the "root cause found, triaging".)
In an era where everyone's vibe coding Excel clones, this is NOT the time to be fucking up your KEY moat on a catastrophic level.
I mean, they still have zero idea what the root cause is 12 hours later.
That's fucking terrifying if true. Guess i'm going to have to watch the tracker as well. I'll live but another "history in the making" moment.
Edit- Yeeeup still very vague translations of "fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck nope fuck fuck fuck"
Not sure why the execs and VPs aren't asking their AI agents to triage. They've been implying they don't need engineers anymore, isn't this the best time to prove themselves right?
The last email received by my partner’s work inbox was a cheerful update from their CTO or whatever about the wonderful progress they had made by moving all employees to work primarily in OneDrive. I kind of wonder if he’s just run away since then.
Imagine how frequently this will happen when old employees take the buyout option. Coupled that with the constant layoffs, the nect decade looks promising for MSFT
Almost 8AM in central europe and outlook is still not working.
Midnight in the west coast now and my 20k+ institution is still communicating via SMS ...
Wrath of the Europeans that still host their own mail servers.
My last email was received at 5.5 hours ago. Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working. All our Azure infrastructure seems fine so this is something 365-specific.
Everyone has occasional outages but this is the worst 365 outage our org has seen since starting with M365 in 2019.
2018 featured a bad one. Couldn't find a good article, but I remember it being basically all day.
https://redmondmag.com/articles/2018/09/11/microsoft-explain...
Of all the things to keep working ;_;
I mean, I think the teams hate can be funny sometimes, but I honestly don’t get it. I’ve used all of the BIG programs. They’re all the fucking same. I can’t point to a single thing that Teams does drastically worse than any of the other options. I think it’s just a meme.
It has copied all the features it just does them all a bit worse.
It's mainly that traumatic new message sound for me.
I’d agree.
I think it does _too much_ and the performance is _bad_ but it’s rock-solid for video and audio calls - more than even FaceTime or analog calls.
I find the teams app to be really flakey. It changes time zones on me at random for a moment at a time.
Preface: I have zero love for Slack. It’s a thing. It’s fine. I can take or leave it.
Using Teams after being used to Slack is like going from VSCode to Eclipse. I’m sure this thing is powerful, but it looks weird, it feels weird, it moves like January molasses, and it has a million features I’m completely uninterested in. I’m sure some people get value from all the baroque. I am not one of them.
(I’d rather be using IRC and Emacs but the world has other ideas.)
Not a slack power user by any means. But went from Slack to Teams and barely noticed much of a difference. We chat when it’s small and pick up the phone when it’s not. I don’t want to automate and add plugins and whatever; I want to do my work, but occasionally that means talking with other people over chat, I type and they see it. Needs met.
I haven't used others, but can they really also not search through the history and jump *fully* to that point? In teams I have to adapt my search once I reach end of context so the context changes.
Discord gets hate for their bad search, but it's vastly superior to teams.
> Teams chat and meetings are the only thing in Microsoft 365 that seem to be working.
Truly, we are in dark times.
Since Microsoft rebrands quite often, perhaps it will be called M364 now?
It might be M363 now.
And I can't reach my self-hosted mail server in the Outlook desktop app because of this.
For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account, if I add the account in Outlook.
> For reasons that I cannot fathom, Microsoft wants to act as the relay to my self-hosted e-mail account
I can conjecture some reasons. Datamining would be high on the list, since MS can read your mail and thus market to you more effectively. Governments might also be happier if MS can provide them with one-stop access (like Prism) to otherwise self-hosted e-mail accounts proxied through a central server.
Or, you know, similar reasons as why people use Cloudflare as a reverse proxy.
I would strongly doubt (though not completely rule out) that Microsoft is reading your personal mail hosted on your personal mail server. Like what would that even look like, their IMAP client is forwarding email to headquarters?
BUT, more likely, it's some sort of "check in" or "dial home" feature that isn't working. Or plausibly, maybe they count "local user checked email" and their analytics endpoint is down.
Regardless, it's definitely surprising that a traditional desktop application would be blocking when only polling from local/trusted data sources.
It probably is a mirror for caching purposes for the mobile app or something. It lets them control the protocol between the client and their server as well.
But a check in or analytic counter wouldn’t stop you from receiving email. This is most likely due to Microsoft’s server (not your local computer) being the one fetching the mail.
It is normally probably more reliable; except when their server is down.
They proxy the whole ball of wax. Have done for years.
My understanding is: the IMAP client is hosted. The local app talks to a HTTP service, and doesn't have mail processing capabilities of its own.
This is correct. You have the option to disable it and use local IMAP if you want, but it pushes you toward using "Microsoft Sync Technology" which does exactly what you were saying/
This is your own fault for using their BS app.
you're getting downvoted but I agree.
play stupid games win stupid prizes.
maybe its the support desk burnout talking, but if you rely on MS apps and services you're gonna have a bad time.
Don’t get the downvotes. Why would you put in all the effort to self host mail and use something that proxies your mail?
I mean, I can still switch to Thunderbird anytime I want, because I use IMAP and don't yank the mail messages from my mail server. And I can still receive mail on my iPhone anyway.
It's just funny that Outlook breaks this badly.
"New" Outlook does route all traffic through Microsoft servers. I assume it's so you can get a "unified" mail look on all your devices (phone, etc), but likely a nice source of data mining
And I hope all of us have learned a valuable lesson.
Personally, I can't reconcile having a self-hosted email server and using Outlook to access said email.
I'm being an ass in saying this, because I'm aware human motivation is a beautiful kaleidoscope of variables, but I would have guessed at the venn diagram of 'those willing to compromise and use a Microsoft product' is mutually exclusive with that of the 'I'm hardcore enough to self-host email'.
I will say, however, that Outlook used to be one of the better desktop email programs, so I'll grant some legacy lenience.
What's your preferred email client? Just wondering what other people are using.
I use FairEmail on Android, which aggregates both my Gmail and self-hosted accounts.
I use Gmail's web interface for my Gmail account (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical)
And in my self hosted email setup I use RoundCube (web interface).
> (which, I'll admit, makes my little rant above more than a little hypocritical)
Na, that would simply be the kaleidoscope part you mentioned, wouldn't it? For what it's worth, I found the combination just as peculiar as you did.
Best one I've ever used was Fastmail's web mail. But it's locked to their platform, so yeah.
Mac/iOS Mail is pretty lightweight. I used to use Thunderbird on Linux.
Surprisingly, Mac mail is a really nice client. It reminds me of how quick eudora was back in the day.
Pegasus Mail.
Almost as good as mutt.
EmClient, Mailcraft
eM Client for various M365 and IMAP accounts. ElectronMail for the 9 ProtonMail accounts I have (allows "tabs" for each account in one client).
Thunderbird still reigns supreme
Mine is Becky! Internet Mail https://www.rimarts.co.jp/becky.htm (sincere)
Great oldschool UI coupled with support for all the modern protocols, and consistently updated: https://www.rimarts.jp/downloads/B2/Readme-e.txt
Eudora
That’s a name I haven’t heard in a longgg time. Google says it’s still being used by some enthusiasts. Were you being sincere?
Thunderbird (desktop), K9 (Android).
The Bat!
The Bat! was my email client of choice for many years, many years ago. Will take another look, thank you for the reminder.
You're not being an ass. You're being a logical person who is advocating for individuals taking responsibility for their choices/actions.
Unfortunately, being someone who speaks up nowadays has been portrayed as being an asshole.
How dare you!?
> Personally, I can't reconcile having a self-hosted email server and using Outlook to access said email.
In a corporate environment, I don't think this would be that unusual. But yes, it's hard to imagine someone would do that in a personal setup.
It does have to do with the fact that Outlook still looks better than Thunderbird.
outlook 2010 works just fine
> For reasons that I cannot fathom
Biggest data heist and most obvious US intelligence operation in human history. I can't fathom why AVs don't treat "Outlook New" as info stealer malware.
I’m pretty certain their desktop client applies filters server-side.
I’m pretty certain because my company’s phishing-test emails skip my filters (I assume admins have a “skip filters” toggle). Which, hilariously, makes it even easier to ensure there’s a place that contains only phishing test emails (filter all not on allow-list of domains to one place, filter all on that list to another, ta-da, the main inbox now contains only phishing test emails)
I assume they do the same thing with non-MS email if you use their client, rather than maintain two filter implementations.
All around, yeah, wow, super gross.
Why would you self host, then use a client with a dependency like this? Seems like the worst of both worlds.
Allegedly, It's so they can use push notifications efficiently from a central place for new mail notifications. Mobile IMAP clients cannot reliably keep a TCP connection open, due to on-device power-management and network management purposes. IMAP natively supports push-based notifications, but mobile networks make that impossible to work reliably.
Which is odd. I also have Outlook for iOS, and the accounts I add in Outlook for Windows don't automatically appear in my Outlook for iOS, even though I have the same Microsoft account logged in in both. So I don't understand how they plan to make push notifications work better for me on my iPhone by relaying my IMAP e-mail account.
Surely you can just use another email client to get the email from your self-hosted server right?
When the excellent Windows 10 Mail app was deprecated and they tried to push Outlook that would work through their online services, I switched to Wino Mail (open remake of Windows 10 Mail). My email works.
Because the new Outlook app is actually a web app talking to a Microsoft Web Server that does the actual mail retrieval. This is all clearly explained in their documentation.
Update from Microsoft: "We've validated an alternative health check method on a subset of affected infrastructure, which allowed the servers in that subset to successfully return to service, and we're now applying this change more broadly.
"We're also preparing an automated recovery process to continually detect and restart unresponsive servers, to help keep them in service while this change progresses."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-11-13/microsoft-outage-affe...
Update as of 10 minutes ago implies that didn't work:
> Current status: We’re continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
So health checks were correct… this solution of silencing the first symptom is probably just adding to the problem. I am afraid they may be opening the door for the fire trucks and getting some other kind of intrusion instead. Better they shut it down for day and do proper fix.
The 12:08:53 AM UTC update is much less hopeful:
Current status: While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior.
Building on the protective traffic management measures we've implemented, we're also temporarily limiting which types of traffic can reach the affected infrastructure in specific locations. This will help us determine whether a particular type of request is contributing to the impact and allow us to restore service incrementally. Additionally, we're rebuilding a subset of affected servers using a previous software configuration to validate whether this prevents them from becoming unresponsive, and we'll expand this approach to additional servers if we observe positive results.
---
The 11:05:31 PM UTC update is is the first since the outage began that feels hopeful.
From the 11:06:31 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've begun returning a portion of the affected servers to service, and they're remaining stable so far. We've also shifted traffic and connections to alternative pathways wherever possible and have observed limited recovery in some regions.
We've streamlined our recovery process to expedite returning the remaining affected servers to service. To further support recovery, we're implementing protective traffic management measures in a specific location to reduce load on the affected infrastructure, and we'll expand these measures to additional locations if we observe positive results. As capacity is restored, users may experience a gradual recovery as their clients reconnect to the service.
---
The 10:11:39 PM UTC update is a little chilling. They don't know why what's happening is happening so they're doing experiments.
I do that with closed-source software when I don't want to bother trying reverse engineer it, but these guys have the code! Yikes.
I recognize that even w/ the code available there are likely behaviors that aren't likely to be anticipated because of the scale of traffic. Complex systems fail in complex and non-intuitive ways.
From the 10:11:39 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss.
To validate a potential recovery approach, we're fully isolating a portion of our service infrastructure, restarting the affected components, and gradually reintroducing traffic to confirm our services remain stable before applying this approach more broadly. We're also analyzing traffic patterns across our entire service infrastructure and evaluating whether isolating traffic within each region may allow affected regions to recover independently.
Not exactly confidence inspiring.
> these guys have the code!
But maybe don't understand it because they didn't write it themselves?
The one guy that did understand the code took VEO, and isn’t answering his phone right now.
1. Life imitate Art
2. Art imitate Life
3. Goto 1
https://youtu.be/3TNpOD6bov8
Thank you for introducing me to this
Damn that video is way too real.
"the velocity is vertical on slide 45" is an absolute headshot for my recent experience.
I'm not comfortable with how much I love that video.
The code by itself doesn't tell you how the various components of a complex distributed system interact in a failure condition with clients hammering retries.
I mean it sort of does if you know the whole system inside and out and have the ability to reason about it, but just having the code for each component doesn't by itself solve the real problem of understanding
Basically their server works well when they they are not used :-p
The 03:07:45 AM UTC update doesn't sound promising either:
Current status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
Translation: "we're bypassing the health check to see if the servers will work despite being unhealthy."
Seems like it didn't work out.
I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working
For now.
One of GitHub's services will be down again by next week.
Well, my mac CI runs aren't being picked up, and they eventually fail because of it. So maybe wherever connects the orchestrator to the machines is having issues.
I spoke too soon!
So basically business as usual with the mac runners, right?
I was gonna say. This happens to my Mac jobs on a normal basis.
Round robin. Github Actions were down yesterday.
GitHub infrastructure is for the most part completely separate from anything at Microsoft, other than using Azure.
Every third build is failing for me failing to publish test results.
Down detector shows like everything is down. AWS, Azure, Office, Gmail. Everything. https://downdetector.com
Teams is working!
Or, rather, it's acting like it usually does.
Right - don't get too ambitious! :D
Yup. I just tried to search my chats for a specific phrase. It came back with nothing, even though I know I used it in a recent conversation.
I just assumed it was Teams being Teams.
Teams: Either It's Working, Or You Are
Remember when Teams ate cellphone batteries like candy? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I remember the first version of office communicator, that when installed, left you with about 6hrs of phone battery.
Back on Window Mobile 6.1.
Battery life usage quickly improved. :)
Funny thing is that my work's VPN that uses the MS authenticator just quit, immediately after I made that comment. So you are even more correct than usual.
I asked someone in our teams meeting if they were having issues with their outlook today. What followed was a 5 minute hate fest on outlook. I'm not a big fan, but was kind of surprised so many people genuinely hate it.
If you could create a real world Outlook, it'd become the new Office Space fax machine.
The new version which is a skinned web browser is terrible
Office on Mac is like malware. It brings the system to a halt.
The worst part about Outlook is the broken search. In the world of infinitely smart AI, the e-mail search in Outlook is embarrassingly stupid.
It’s not just that it’s stupid. It’s broken. It can’t handle email that is on the server and not on the machine, and they’ve configured the app to store most email only on the server.
That choice is also so stupid. Why doesn't Outlook just store the text of every single email on all devices. The stupid software needs gigabytes of storage, why can't it spend a couple of megabytes on making e-mail actually work.
down detector always looks like this during big cloud service outages. i think partly because people don't actually know what services they're using and report wrong things, and partly because downdetector parses social media posts like "outlook is down but gmail still works" as outlook and gmail both being down.
Not GitHub!
As luck would have it GitHub sign-ups are down https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/nwbjzl7nfrc2
I work in IT and people are complaining about Atlassian and about AWS but in reality if your organization is using SSO then that would get impacted.
If your org is using Intune or Defender EDR then you probably also are impacted.
Entra is not impacted, SSO is working for non-M365 apps.
Downdetector does not measure service availability. It's more of a vibes thing.
Downdetector is a survey, not a detector, and suffers from user confusion when a high-profile service is actually down, as users start reporting unrelated things
Especially when looking constitutes reporting (Schrödinger's downdetector?) and people look at everything after showing up for one thing.
It also suffers from people reporting functionally related (but not technical related) things.
Any other service that interacts with Outlook in some way will create downstream effects in other services expecting Outlook to work normally.
The biggest problem with downdetector is how they visualise their outage graphs.
The Y axes are entirely independent, and so when there's an outage for Microsoft Outlook (which peaked at ~130k reports) and you get a negligable spike in pepole who get confused and report gmail (~1k reports), the graphs all look correlated and connected.
They need to show the graphs with an absolute y-axis set by the worst outage, or scale the graphs by estimated average daily users or something.
AWS seems fine?
Here's a theory: A network change made connection setup more expensive or forced mass reconnects, saturating the front ends’ secure-connection process. Saturated servers fail health checks and get pulled, so the survivors take more load and fail too. Every client that gets dropped reconnects, and each reconnect needs a fresh secure handshake. That is why restarted servers die as soon as traffic returns. The outage now sustains itself even with the trigger being reverted, hence the traffic blocking and staged reintroduction. The most recent surge is likely retry amplification, partly caused by their own traffic rebalancing.
They should be able to mitigate that at the border. Whatever load balancing solution is in place should just drop connections before they get to a point that can overload the system. That they haven't, or can't, makes me think it's more complicated than "it's hard to bring it back up when everyone is trying to get back in"
Agree. For a large cloud provider, the thundering herd retry-storm is pretty standard failure scenario and a "greatest hit" outage at this point.
Throttle the hell out of everything, then slowly ramp traffic back up.
I'm confident they've already tried this exact thing. This is cloud 101 in 2026.
So i know fuck all and am basically just rubbernecking the car crash at this point, but I would've agreed however they just dropped this gem:
> Current status: As part of our ongoing efforts to advance the recoverability of our frontend servers, we’re evaluating traffic controls that can be applied to increase capacity and stability. This includes traffic optimization actions such as traffic throttling, protocol adjustments, and failover routing intended to improve stability in active regions. In parallel, were expanding internal testing to track activity within a contained environment to improve traffic monitoring and issue detection capabilities.
That...kinda reads like they're just trying it? I'm assuming there's something being missed or it's a "fuck it try it again" but I do wonder if some story is going to come out of people in the decision making seats who don't know what they're doing.
Could be a bunch of dumb dumbs.
Also called meta-stable failures - https://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2023/09/metastable-failure...
Sounds like it running correctly was the meta-stable state. Failure is actually more stable since it can reach a failed state from the ground state of simply not running.
Isn’t this very similar cause to the AWS us-east-1 outage from last year. I thought I remember it being about a network change that overloaded servers, leading to a cascading failure.
> Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
DDOS?
Too many AI agents connecting at once?
sam altman needs a big headline to shore up AI funding
Perhaps they will attempt to "conscript" all of our RAM.
Maybe people trying to catch the next Nvidia headline ahead of everyone else, wherever it may be found in (likely someone's inbox.)
Edit: Oh, there it is.
isn't Microsoft 365 called Copilot now?
It’s actually O365 by Microsoft featuring Copilot by Bill Gates.
The Copilot O365 Gates, Bill G==B signature box
lol
At this point Microsoft would be better off using Copilot to brand itself.
Recursive self-promotion.
A Silicon Valley reference.
no, Copilot and Copilot Premium are products on the M365 platform, copilot is down too
Surely you mean Microsoft Copilot Premium for Copilot for M365 for Copilot.
For Copilot.
…for workgroups
My guess: too many DC resources dedicated to AI, leaving insufficient free capacity to handle traffic spikes
I laughed then realized this is plausible
And then they're probably trying to debug with their AI which isn't helping.
Seems unlikely to me. Different hardware requirements. AI workloads aren't running on your standard 2U server.
>reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
I saw a frog smoking on The Little Rascals once, but never a gnu.
At first I thought you meant the traffic increase had something to do with free software :/
Certainy not Unix!
CNU?
I'd like to think that The Smoking Gnu was a competitor publication to The Lone Gunmen.
(I've recently been revisiting the X-Files. Can recommend.)
I think you would probably also like the spinoff “The lone gunmen”. Pity it was only one season.
Yeah, once I'm done with X-Files it'll be next on the list. Seems there are those who love it and those who really don't, and not much in between.
One of my favorite shows! I have two, the other is Yes Minister.
I see you are a human of culture!
Thanks you! I realized I misspelled a word.
Oh man, Yes Minister is almost too good. I was making my way through that series as well, a while back, but I think I got sidetracked by Trump winning the election and Yes Minister just seemed like the actual news.
I'll get back into it. Can't recommend it highly enough.
It is really a pity that people don't make those nowadays. It is too politically incorrect and inconvenient to see reality turning into a comedy show.
If Outlook can go down because of DDOS then it's a much worse problem.
If it would go away from a DDOS that would be a much better solution.
Probably self inflicted by some code change, as they mention "specific type of service traffic".
EDIT: Seems like now they confirmed that: "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service."
Microsoft 365 Status
@MSFT365Status
16m
We've not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that's responsible for processing server health. We've taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
Is this a case of "who shall healthcheck the health checker?"
Currently (17:22EST):
> Previous status: We're continuing to work through restarting and validating the affected servers to safely return them to service, and we're exploring opportunities to expedite this process. In parallel, we're assessing whether reverting the small number of recent configuration updates we identified could help accelerate recovery.
If failures started at some point in time then something must have changed just prior to that. If no changes in traffic were detected (no DDOS) then it must have been a change, be it code or config. Duuuh.
> then something must have changed just prior to that
Not at all, they could have simply hit an unexpected behavior for their infra they hadn't seen, tested, or expected before. Global scale infra gets very, very complex, and tbh this is Microsoft... they're not very good at it.
Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems. It's usually config change or code change, not necessarily in the component that's misbehaving, but it is somewhere.
More often than not, it's DNS :)
> Unexpected behavior doesn't happen out of the blue, it's not LLM, these are deterministic systems.
Oh... Oh I have news for you :)
No kidding. One computer can behave ~99.999% deterministically. A large network of them? Never.
Reminds me of this https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
Nah, just a "Reply-All" chain at NVDA...
Or millions of xbox downloading GTA
As someone who worked in infrastructure for a large global CDN, this sort of overload issues happen all the time when trying to bring infrastructure back online after an issue.
First, you have every client retrying connections, whether automated or manual retries. This generates extra load over normal.
In addition, whichever systems come online first often get a ton of traffic sent to them, which can immediately bring them back down if you don't have ways to prevent it. You will get a wave of systems coming back online, a ton of traffic hitting them, and then falling over again.
Now, I am sure Microsoft is used to this and has procedures and systems in place to mitigate the issues (I know we did).
However, sometimes if the right combination of services are failing, even the strategies you had to avoid this sort of failure can themselves fail.
I know it’s not actually that easy but don’t they just have some gateway that’s rejecting 100% of requests and they very gently lower that intentional rejection percentage over time?
It is exactly that easy as long as it isn't the gateway that is the problem.
In many cases, yet it is that simple.
However, in other cases it can be more complicated. For example, if the requesters are other internal services, they might not be behind a single gateway (although you should then have other controls you can use). Other times, it is not easy to block the RIGHT requests, because it is hard to distinguish which backend services will end up being hit by a request (a single request can trigger multiple calls to multiple services).
There is also the problem of catch up - if a system in a stable state is close to max capacity, it might never have the capacity to recover from a failure even if the entire system is restored. For example, imagine a log processing system that can just barely handle the normal peak load; if you have a failure where your producers locally store logs until they can send them upstream, you will have to clear that backlog, which requires additional capacity beyond a full steady state, which you might not have.
And you never really get an opportunity to thoroughly test these failure & recovery modes until something catastrophic happens, at which point capturing detailed metrics and assessing the right sequence to perform the actions are both challenging at best.
Yep. There is simply no load testing you can do when you reach certain levels of traffic. Nothing can generate the type of load you get when you have millions of end users making requests from thousands of different networks, on different equipment and network configurations.
Got notification at work the MS 360 services were offline or degraded and the company was working with MS to fix the problem.
Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.
Yeah every IT dept is sending out that notification. Someone replied with 'When do you expect it to be back online?" to which I LOL emoted at the moment. I think I'm a jerk. But how can you ask such a question- as if they planned a time to restore services and aren't working to restore it as quickly as possible?
Here's the Reddit post with discussions around this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1xuje83/microsoft...
Software / software service quality has been declining for a few years IMO.
Coincidentally with massive programmer layoffs?
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
AI agents should be able to resolve this quicker than employees, right?
Service quality is in better hands after the layoffs, at least that’s what investors are led to believe.
AI is good at incident diagnosis, but AI slop code may have actually caused this: designing to avoid cascading failures is something AI doesn't do so well
The place where I consistently see AI/LLMS/Agents/language-widgets-with-tools fail at making decent code (and more often configuration) is infrastructure.
The number of times it has spit out a python program where a much simpler bash script would do, is too many to count.
I have a pet theory that if you don't know what you really want, and aren't skilled enough to understand what you got, infra code is THE WORST.
Anecdote: I wanted a simple change to an ansible playbook today. GPT-6-Astra/codex came up with the most convoluted, brittle solution possible the first time, even though it was extending and already clear, idiomatic playbook. It took some amount of offensive and critical prompting to get it to use ansible's built in modules and tooling to do the same job - and do so with nearly 80% less configuration and like 1000% more human readability.
Some part of me harbours a sneaking suspicion that the "throw everything at it" ethos is by design, not as a defensive measure against crappy code, but as a way to ensure there's so much code and it's so convoluted orgs and operators (or developers) are stuck/addicted.
It's still a force multiplier - but it's by no means driverless, especially for existing/already-running infra.
I work as a (depressed lol) sysadmin apprentice in a small MSP company (I live in Europe) and boy do I got a story about Ansible playbooks: We made an offer to one of our clients to automate the deployment of software to their computers (this is a client with around 150-200 employees, depending on whether you count only the "core" employees or also security and maintenance staff). Before we made and implemented this offer using Ansible, they did not have any sort of Software Deployment tool whatsoever, everything got installed fully manually.
(they also used to have local admin rights on all of their client computers until one employee got phished and literally gave away their personal ID card via a webcam)
In any case, guess who got to implement all the relevant playbooks for installing software and what tool they used for it? Our company literally handed the job to an intern who had no IT background whatsoever. I say this not to be mean, he was legitimately just at our company because a government program required him to do an internship.
He used Deepseek (our company does not believe in purchasing LLM subscriptions, at least not for us normal employees) to write literally all of the playbooks for any kind of software that mattered to our clients.
Now, as I said before, I am only an apprentice, and I am certainly not a good programmer by any means, but I read through parts of the Ansible documentation and had worked with it before, and I understood enough to at least be able to roughly judge whether a playbook made sense or was just way too complicated and convoluted.
I had to help this intern out multiple times, because he hadn't yet understood that, in order to write a functioning playbook, you first had to somewhat understand how to deploy a piece of software on a single test machine using CMD or Powershell syntax with an according .exe or .msi.
He simply prompted, pasted the playbook and then reprompted with the error codes from the failed playbook until it somehow worked or until I had to help him out.
This took place in December or November of last year and the playbooks are mostly still pretty shitty if I am being honest.
I did take away an important lesson from this "episode", though: LLMs can be very usefuly for writing code, or in this case, Ansible playbooks, but only if you have a somewhat decent and basic grasp of how software installation works via CMD/powershell and if you took the time to read through and learn about at least the basic Ansible concepts.
Since I am only an apprentice (on paper and in terms of my knowledge and how I get paid, not in terms of how much I am expected to earn for the company), I have painfully experienced how important it is to possess a certain level of understanding about the infra-related code and scripts that you would like LLMs to write for you, because otherwise it very quickly spirals out of control and starts throwing everything at the problem, just as you described.
Assuming AI agents are not the cause of the incident.
> This usually isn't a software quality issue... overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment
That is a software issue.
Basically the number one issue these days
I don't consider fat-fingering a BGP route or a DNS entry to be a "software" issue directly.
Infra is >90% software nowadays
I blame bad vibes
> ... has been declining for a few years IMO
Interesting: there's a huge correlation with everybody beginning to use LLMs.
And we dismiss it as being non-causal by saying it all started going downhill before the advent of LLMs?
I don't buy it. I think we're seeing the results of what happens when you hand the keys of the kingdom to LLMs.
Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
> Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
Current industry best practice is to use LLMs improperly.
How do you use LLMs properly?
With engineering rigor. They are fantastic tools for quickly navigating large codebases, ingesting large amounts of data, refactoring legacy code, compiling multiple formats of data, following defined patterns, and many other proper uses for the tools.
That doesn’t mean the code/result doesn’t still need to meet our engineering standards.
Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
> Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
One of the best ways to deal with doing something the wrong way is to get rid of all the people who know how to do it correctly. That way no one knows any better, so no one has to confront the fact they're actually doing it wrong.
I really don't see the correlation, actually. On the contrary, I'm finding nasty defects with it that have been dormant for long and handwaved away, with repros to reveal them.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
It's the same with layoffs: there's always a top comment trying very hard to convince everybody that AI usage has played no part.
Well no, Windows has been more or less all downhill since Vista.
Give or take a few decades, maybe. Absolutely exponentially accelerating as of late so the earlier linear trend is not even visible to many
I suspect some possible relation to SignDrop or attempts to patch it.
SignDrop is an unpatched Windows zero-day local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit that allows a standard user to gain NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM privileges by abusing the Common Log File System (CLFS) kernel driver (clfs.sys). Security researcher Abdelhamid Naceri (also known as MSNightmare or Nightmare Eclipse) published a detailed technical write-up and functional proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub on November 10, 2026.
Are you finding these vulns with Mythos/Daybreak or some other tool? Chinese models perhaps?
Not impossible, but very unlikely. CLFS isn’t remotely reachable, it's a kernel driver reached through local API calls and has no network listener. AFAIK the historical CLFS CVEs are all rated as local.
There was an RCE recently disclosed for ... paint.exe - CVE-2026-83844
https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/CVE-20...
So really anything is on the table at this point
Except, once again Microsoft crapped the bed... it's not an RCE in any capacity...
> Revision 2.1, Nov 7: “Added an FAQ and updated the CVSS score. This is an informational change only.” > Vector: now AV:L and UI:R (local attack vector, user interaction required), scoring 7.0.
Downdetector says LOTS of stuff is down. https://downdetector.com
Damn. That is crazy. The curve kinda looks like the curve that happens every november to the Google searches of "all I want for christmas is you"
Downdetector's methodology is pretty garbage. I'm always surprised to see techies referencing them.
It's something to reference. My view is that it's better than "doesn't load for me".
What's your preferred alternative?
The snarky but honest response is HackerNews/Reddit. But if you're trying for something that actually checks the sites you point it at instead of relying on users reporting "issues", a buddy of mine runs https://onlineornot.com/ and it seems generally more reliable.
Back in the golden days you could just go to search.twitter.com, search "AWS", and sort by recent.
Still can. AWS Status pages are still terrible. See HN for the outage a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45640838
> Still can.
No. It requires an account now, and they did away with the recent posts firehose.
"Start Free Trial" -- uh, no thanks. You seem skeptical of crowd sourcing. Enjoy your Encyclopedia Brittanica.
Ping?
Apparently Outlook, Gmail, etc are all working on the server at 192.168.1.1 then - ping says it's responding just fine
Full Disclosure, this is a Cisco product and I work there.
ThousandEyes Internet Insights offers a public outage map at https://www.thousandeyes.com/outages/ that is MASSIVELY more accurate (and faster to detect) than Down Detector because its based on actual telemetry and not on crowdsourcing.
Thank you for the recommendation!
They indicate sharepoint is getting blown out... again.
It is ironic that this outage map _also_ is not loading for me right now
Yes, just to confirm, it seems that our platform is getting hammered at the moment and it's causing the page to take a long time to load or intermittently load. We are looking into it.
https://status.thousandeyes.com/incidents/3tnqsbbgvw4x
How ironic
It is back up now.
There will be a more detailed message when we finish the SII on our status page at the link I previously provided, but the short version is we took way more traffic than normal to our platform and the related workers were running out of memory.
it seems to be down... lol
still down :)
LOL. Share defaults to X.com
seems smart to link to the most popular platform by default. there's other share links at the bottom for the less popular ones
It's not that popular, is it? It's tiny compared to, like, Whatsapp.
X to Whatsapp is apples to oranges
How are you defining "most popular platform", then. X is pretty small compared with any of the big ones.
The public outage map is primarily a marketing page, because customers receive deeper insights in-product. Given that most people discuss outages live/up-to-the-minute on Twitter, that is why its where we default to sharing.
Honestly I trust downdetector more than that. Crowdsourcing always wins.
Downdetector said basically everything was down today (including Google, AWS, etc.) but they aren't affected. This makes me NOT trust downdetector.
That's definitely your prerogative. Internet Insights uses various techniques to analyze billions of metrics gathered daily from hundreds of thousands of vantage points around the Internet to detect outages in minutes, while providing (in the paid product) corroborating evidence based on that collected telemetry to support its conclusions. Crowdsourcing is subject to the vagaries of crowds.
My extensive DDoS bot network... er I mean my distributed website validation platform!
It seems like one of the best methodologies there is? Real people reporting real outages of a service they use?
I often know about outages dozens of minutes in advance of it being posted on official channels (or in the case of AWS, three days later...).
So what if the resolution is low because people can't log in to Fortnite and an Azure outage gets shown as an Epic Games outage. Doesn't matter. The live feed is incredibly reassuring from a "down for anyone else this instant, before official status page has a chance to see it?" Saves me so much time knowing whether it's a me-or-them issue.
How is it garbage? It's crowdsourced monitoring so sure, there will be false positives (especially when aws/cloudflare/azure/bgp services have a bad day), but it's one of the best indicators to quickly know if _something_ is going on.
Yeah, but the methodology means that normies are going to inaccurately blame AWS and Google (both are down right now according to downdetector)
At least it reports the numbers they are getting, you can see that outlook has 130k reports while AWS only has 1.3k.
not really, soon as i had a problem with outlook i went there and already saw user reports and a massive spike confirming it wasn't anything on my end.
As someone who ends up being unofficial downdetector-primary at a company, dealing with this shit and the fact that people cannot comprehend its mis-attribtion wastes so much of my time.
Still more reliable than most of the status pages that even lie after the outages
At the other extreme is Microsoft's own dashboard (https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status) whose methodology is so "rigorous" that it probably won't show anything about today's outage until next week, if at all!
Since this isn’t an Azure outage why would that page show anything ever?
At the time I believed it was an Azure outage. And Office 365 relies on Azure stuff and would probably go down with it.
From what I've seen it seems people complaining they can't get emails from MS so that's why gmail is showing as down.
And with Google is people complaining Chrome doesn't load their "pages". I bet they mean outlook.
My housemate texted me saying our internet is so slow because outlook wasn't loading. So I think lots of people associate email not working with entire internet not working..
With how many people are unable to associate a "broken" monitor with an unplugged HDMI/DisplayPort or power cable, it doesn't surprise me that most people would not make a disctinction between the "internet" and "Outlook".
This happens every time there's an outage. People see their email not working and go there and mark everything as down regardless of whether it is affected or not. There's nothing wrong with Gmail or AWS or Cloudflare or Facebook.
"There's nothing wrong with . . . Facebook."
That's a bold claim to make on HN.
ThousandEyes while it was loading seemed to have centralized around it mostly being a Microsoft outage.
https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
Azure status does not document anything:
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status
All that said... Stuff on my home PC started getting various DNS issues around the time my email started acting weird. Hard to say how widespread it is. It may be bigger than Microsoft even.
everything non-microsoft works fine here!
This is an M365 outage, not an Azure outage. M365 has a separate status page with information: https://status.cloud.microsoft/m365
This is going to bring about a huge move back to local servers and local software for offices, as many people are unable to correspond or use Microsoft software right now. I am glad I refused to move our small office to 365, even if it meant sticking with older versions. I could have probably moved everyone to Linux and open-source software, but as the tech guy in our office, I didn't want the extra workload of dealing with all the support.
I've yet to see a great replacement for Excel outside of gridcraft. Things like Libre CAN do it, but there's a lot of pain, and the average excel user isn't going to get over most of those hurdles without a ton of hand holding.
I agree that Excel is hard to replace but email should have never been moved to the cloud.
> This is going to bring about a huge move back to local servers and local software for offices, as many people are unable to correspond or use Microsoft software right now
One can only hope. But I am not so sure. No one seems to want to employ a local sysadmin these days.
You should start your own business offering sysadmin services to small businesses.
Good luck with that. They have all migrated to AWS in 2015+
There are plenty of mom & pop businesses that just need someone to setup their computers, network them, and ensure they're not being infected with shit. You'd be surprised how many people struggle with email, documents, spreadsheets, a printer, and maybe an app or two.
Think of yourself as a blue-collar contractor providing services to white-collar people afraid of being taken advantage of. Your competitive advantage over Geek Squad is being the local IT person who knows the names of everyone in a five-person real estate or law office.
Word of mouth will take care of everything else for you.
Nah it'll be forgotten about in a week
After a single outage, I doubt it. Don't get me wrong, I wish it was the case, but this, like all news will be soon forgotten.
A few more outages though.. maybe?
This year has been terrible for outages, the European Google power outage earlier this year, the PHP stuff (although that's only tangentially related),the AWS outage in May, Cloudflare a couple times around this time last year, Salesforce.
I can tell you somewhat anecdotally that people who usually forget about this stuff are starting to notice.
I dunno.
The 2011 Blackberry outage burried RIM..... companies ran away from them faster than a greyhound with its arse on fire.
It's insane that Microsoft continues to have global outages. Tech debt is real, service delivery on a planetary level means change is measured and deliberate, but...it's been years. YEARS.
10p ET update:
> Current status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
Tbh I’ve been maybe mildly impressed by how honest the past like, 5 updates have been about changes not working / taking / resolved as expected. Would have anticipated less direct honesty for whatever reason. But also sadly comical in that I feel most engineers have been there and know the feeling, and also holy moly it’s been an issue for a while!
I sort of agree but also: what else are you going to say? Some kind of soviet "Nope, everything working fine, you must be imagining things"? :)
And why do all the update messages sound like AI slop?
Haha doesn’t hurt to try a different approach!
EDIT: with the most recent one it seems they might be moving backwards …
> As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
The forced status updates come from the idea that resolution is a linear and quantifiable process, like copying a file from here to there. The idea an issue is caused by the unknown, and the remedy is unknown, is incompatible with processes and worldviews.
Forced status updates are still good. Even if they just say "we are still working on it and attempts so far have failed" it keeps people from thinking Microsoft is just playing GTA VI instead of working on it. Managing expectations is just as important as restoring service. Sometimes (probably not with a global email service) even more important. You can get away with a lot of downtime in some services as long as you are communicating what's going on
> a linear and quantifiable process, like copying a file from here to there
I take it you've never seen a Windows file copy dialog :)
No more "Previous", just "We’re continuing our efforts to improve server stability to improve traffic flow"...
Maybe the execs went home, so its the lower-level people approving the updates now and they just want to get it out and get back to trying to help resolving the thing.
I doubt the execs are “going home” today
This is a very entertaining message but I do feel bad for the engineers
https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468
> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
If by "reports" you mean "literally every Outlook user on the planet", sure
https://imgflip.com/i/b5ty93
Maybe problems with the Microsoft 365 Substrate that they dont like to talk too much about, but uses Microsoft Exchange code base to store copies of data that is exposed in higher level services. Some of Teams data is stored there (you cant get at it from Exchange) but not all. It also is involved in retention and other stuff used in Purview.
My knowledge of this isnt great, but I remember being given a briefing on some of this years ago.
The status page reports that defender, DLP and others are now affected. This could get really ugly really fast.
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
Productivity up 20%
Focus time, and this time you don't even have to (nor you can) reserve time-slot in the calendar.
My PRs need approval but I have no way to ping anyone (screams internally)
Is Excel down too?
license servers are down, so we can't use even the desktop products at our large enterprise
Then it’s a huge impact on economy
Teams has been working all day for me but I haven't been able to use outlook (app, not web) for about 7 hours now. Fortune 20 company, BTW.
I always wonder what would happen if 365 goes down for a week.
Presumably: 358.
Curious nobody allows for the possibility this all comes as result of some adversarial action on behalf of … potentially so many actors, and given the recent streak and stream of CVEs discovered with help of LLMs.
So my bet is if this is in any way AI related - perhaps the reasoning should go the other way around and is not mere dumbness of otherwise great company everyone’s buying like crazy for years now. Even my diehard Apple fans friends own MS stock.
> Curious nobody allows for the possibility this all comes as result of some adversarial action on behalf of … potentially so many actors, and given the recent streak and stream of CVEs discovered with help of LLMs.
Occam's razor.
For what it’s worth, the latest status updates from Microsoft address this concern: “At this time, we have no evidence of malicious activity associated with this incident.”
Abscence of evidence vs evidence of absence notwithstanding, it’s probably best not to overly speculate.
I think the "at this time" is important, they were probably more focused on bringing everything back rather than doing a full investigation. I'm curious about the post mortem.
Microsoft employs enough people that they can afford to have one team scan for unusual ingress/egress traffic patterns while others work on troubleshooting. If not, they should not be shedding 60k employees right now.
Looking at MS' track record I'm confused why anyone would assume a malicious 3rd party first while Microsoft has been "trying to turn it off and on" again for hours.
Blaming every outage on some evil AI aggressor isn't helping. It's just more FUD.
GitHub the other day went down because of an influx of anonymous users. Microsoft has hinted that surging connections caused the outage. I wonder if these two are linked?
Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Status page is down. Much of our org is halted.
Fingers crossed that Azure isn't impacted (seems fine so far)
(https://www.geekwire.com/2026/microsoft-makes-new-voluntary-...)
> Isn't this the company that is trying to get rid of 25% of their employees?
Just clarifying this in general, when a company makes a voluntary offer to some segment of employees, especially at this size, it is a statistics game of how many people accept the buy out.
They did not make the offer to 25% of the employees to downsize by 25%, they did it to downsize by 5% (or something like that), and then made the offer based on how many they expect to accept. This is specifically covered in this line of the geekwire article:
> Microsoft didn’t provide a projection for how many employees will accept, but the company told GeekWire it anticipates a much smaller share than the roughly 30% who took its earlier voluntary retirement offer, which went to longtime employees more likely to take the deal.
They probably expect 10-20% of those offered to take it, which would result in a 2.5-5% total downsizing.
Yeah - I get it. Just poking the bear a bit. We've had some major incidents this year from multiple vendors, it has been aggravating.
Hmm. More than normal?
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
The speed of change has accelerated drastically at some organizations, so even if quality stayed the same, the number of outages would increase because of the # of changes has condensed to happen over much shorter time frames.
Why do they offer these buy outs at all, doesn't the US have at will employment?
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?
At will applies on a one by one basis - at a certain headcount, WARN legislation applies https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/layoffs/warn
And the other part is the "goodwill" you mention - if you jettison people for nothin en masse, word gets out, and make it hard to hire in the future
A layoff of any real size has negative impacts to their unemployment insurance premiums and restricts their ability to file PERM for employees. Meeting those targets with voluntary separation prevents those impacts.
If you lay people off, you’re on the hook for their unemployment. A voluntary buyout avoids that, and also avoids mandatory reporting for layoffs.
That’s not entirely accurate. Washington State pays unemployment, not the company. The state funds unemployment by taxing payrolls, but it’s much more indirect than most people think.
Claims do affect the rate they pay next year, but the company isn’t “on the hook” for you personally, at least not any more than they are for your social security income.
Voluntary reductions do not have the same reporting requirements or protections that actual layoffs have.
I think both parties probably benefit; people who are more likely to take the offer are those who have another reason to leave (unfulfilled, etc). This will benefit the company in the long run because they can eventually replace them with someone who want to join (people applying for the job).
Can go the other way though: people who've been there for a while, are motivated and back themselves to get another job will take redundancy (i.e. the people you want to keep).
People who aren't motivated and/or don't back themselves to get another job will stay (i.e. probably the people you want to get rid of)
You can at will fire but that doesnt stop lawsuits. Most of these require signing docs to get the payout. It is a way to cut cleanly and derisk the cut
The fact that it is always Big Even Number shows how stupid it is. Imagine if it was serious like "23.5176%" then you'd know they actually did their homework on leaning up operations instead of just cutting off limbs and seeing if it can still walk or not.
I can't access my Outlook.com account so I guess Azure's having problems.
The CFO said in an interview they only expected 3% or less to actually take the offer.
Sure but if you're one of the 22% you aren't exactly going to be very motivated after that
Relax. I'm sure they have copilot working on it.
WOO-HOO! I'm going home.
Same for me. Status won’t load even.
Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…
Everyone that is a whole stack programmer (say, kernel to webapp) has seen just how unnecessarily complicated everything has become. Watching it burn to the ground would be a pornographic miracle.
Not yet fixed.
anyone else just watch the admin portal post an update and then roll it back to the previous update....guess it didn't work. "We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service." was the old message from 7:52 UTC now it rolled back to 7:30 UTC update again
Soo...
I did a 20-year stint in IT security (quit when my company was bought by a capital fond that wanted us to still do all the things but preferred not to pay wages.)
I still don't feel qualified to guess what happened here - since I know next to nothing about this incident.
But darn it, it's not like we have anything else to do...
So here's my wild (emphasis) guess.
a) Lots of organisations have an "allow any" hole in their firewall for ike+ipsec, usually for reasons like "that protocol seems complicated, firewalling it would be complicated", more or less.
b) There used to be botnets that could pacify routers with modified GRE datagrams, specifically the "Mirai" botnet, operating from hijacked webcams (doesn't exist anymore afaik).
c) New botnets have surely emerged, and improved on the capabilities, maybe building on the publicized source code.
d) Just to give a random example, the "Proxynvader" botnet hijacks TV sticks; assessments vary but some experts say a quarter million, some say up to 8 million devices, each capable of delivering 0.1 Gbps into a volumetric attack.
I think it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine one of those botnets grew the capability to spoof fx. ipsec datagrams, and that someone out there decided it would be fun if Microsoft's server parks started spending more time on fragment reassembly and decryption and less time doing whatever Microsoft thinks those servers should be doing. And then began blasting them with traffic on fx. 4500/udp.
(So in this example, traffic is routed around the normal ingress path through load balancers, tls offload, etc. for those servers, hitting them directly on a public IP via a permissive firewall rule instead.)
I think my odds of being correct are about 1% :-), since little is publicly known yet (and I personally know much much less than that.)
I enjoy reading the other theories here; some very interesting ones!
Haven't given much thought to motivation, could be anything. (I guess having an impact on the equity price means there's theoretically a profit to be made though.)
(... tldr: "ddos maybe?" ...)
https://status.cloud.microsoft/ is very slow to load.
The page is showing a "Service Degredation" for "Microsoft 365 (Business or Enterprise)"
Updates below in reverse chronological order:
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:30:36 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 7:16:03 PM UTC update:
Current status: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
---
From the Thurdsay, November 12, 2026 at 6:59:24 PM UTC update:
Current status: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:32:25 PM UTC update:
Title: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services.
More info: Potentially impacted services include:
- Exchange Online
- Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint Online
- Microsoft Copilot 365
- Microsoft Defender XDR
Current status: We’re investigating an issue impacting multiple Microsoft 365 services and we've determined the affected infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're restarting and repairing impacted portions of this infrastructure to restore capacity, and reviewing an unexpected increase in a specific type of service traffic to determine whether it's contributing to the elevated load. In parallel, we're evaluating options to redirect traffic to alternate infrastructure to expedite relief.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
---
From the Thursday, November 12, 2026 at 6:10:02 PM UTC update:
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access the affected Microsoft 365 services.
User impact: Users may be unable to connect to their mailboxes in Exchange Online through multiple connection methods.
More info: Potentially impacted connection methods may include:
- Outlook on the web
- Messaging API (MAPI)
- Exchange ActiveSync (EAS)
- Representational State Transfer (REST) API
Current status: We’ve identified connectivity errors occurring on a portion of Exchange Online infrastructure which receives and processes users’ access requests. We’ve collected networking logs to review to further investigate the source of these errors and confirm our next steps.
Scope of impact: This issue may affect users attempting to access their mailbox in Exchange Online using the affected connection methods.
Next update by: Thursday, November 12, 2026, at 8:00 PM UTC
---
Aside: What with the nature of the Teams, OneDrive, etc, products being Sharepoint and Exchange in a trenchcoat this is probably creating quite a mess for services besides Exchange Online, too.
Edit: Looks like the status page needs a status page.
Edit: Verified w/ multiple other parties that Teams and OneDrive are having issues, too. Interestingly, Microsoft 365 Family services are working fine. That makes me wonder if that product is running on separate infrastructure (or just hasn't caught fire yet).
Edit: The RSS feed seems to load fairly quickly: https://status.cloud.microsoft/api/feed/mac
502 The service behind this page isn't responding to Azure Front Door.
I was assured that with cloud we wouldn't have a single point of failure like we did on-premise. I must have fallen asleep at my desk.
That was never the promise. The nearest to that is the promise of multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure, but neither of those have anything to do with outages of specific Microsoft services.
The "you can't possibly have better redundancy in your on-prem" was absolutely a sales pitch I heard to move to Microsoft 365.
The biggest site I work for, who went M365 hybrid last year, has incurred more Exchange downtime today than they had all of last year with their on-prem Exchange servers.
The service has redundancy, better than individual operators could provide on-prem. From the customer standpoint though, the service as a whole is a single point of failure: it either works or it doesn't.
It sounds like you are talking more about product reliability of M365 than you are about enterprise infrastructure reliability. M365 is a Microsoft product. M365 has no bearing on the credibility of cloud infrastructure as a whole, which is what your original comment spoke to.
Maybe not where you are but that's legitimately what our project managers were saying. We all knew better, of course.
YEah, that is not loading, along with the root status.cloud.microsoft , which MS links in their Xitter update [0]
What MS has posted so far:
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We're investigating reports of users experiencing issues accessing Exchange Online mailboxes through multiple connection methods in the Americas. More details can be found in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543. 12:54 PM · Nov 12, 2026
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> While we're working to mitigate impact, we've confirmed the issue may affect Microsoft 365 service connectivity for users in any region, more information will be provided in the Microsoft 365 admin center under EX1550543.
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> We've determined a portion of infrastructure is experiencing elevated load across multiple regions, which is likely contributing to the connectivity errors. We're providing more information under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft
>> Microsoft 365 Status >> @MSFT365Status >> 20m >> We've begun redistributing connection traffic across our broader worldwide infrastructure to help balance the load. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as https://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.
[0] https://x.com/MSFT365Status/status/2120938282204688468
In my language many would say “descansito” :)
Oh estoy haciendolo
I need to start working on adding this word to English...
Hopefully, AI can help them fix it.
In cybersecurity we had black october, now we having black November it seems
currently the people who brought us black october are starting it!
Eternal October, very nice.
Service is back in Japan if anyone wants to VPN and check their emails
That doesn't work. Your tenant location is fixed.
For personal outlook
hotmail.com seems to be delivering spam normally. The public MS mail systems must use different infrastructure.
Anybody else was served raw text of source by default ? (gwire is down too)
I’m at a large general business trade association meeting today. It’s definitely caused a prominent buzz. The impacts of this in terms of lost productivity are pretty huge. Yes, the controller can still work on the proforma, for instance. But he cannot easily share it with outside parties. And he can’t search his email for relevant records needed for the work.
Down for our whole organization as well.
Same here
Not surprising. Azure's data centers are out of capacity. In our region they've announced they won't be able to build out capacity for several years.
I've only ever dealt with Exchange at small scale, and even then it was fiddly. I can't imagine what it takes to fix something like this at a global scale with the world watching.
Outlook is fine. Exchange is experiencing issues.
That kind of depends on what you mean by "Outlook".
Sure, the program on your desktop computer is fine, but the Outlook app on your phone routes everything through MSFT's servers, so you may be impacted. Outlook.com is running EWS, so it would be down as well.
And finally, if you're talking to a layperson, they're not going to know what Exchange is. They just know they opened Outlook and it isn't working.
No, it doesn't depend. Outlook is an app. If you don't have internet access, do you say Chrome is down?
I just got a stream of Outlook emails, however it quickly stopped sync'ing any more.
Without anything else to go off of it points to it certainly being a capacity, traffic, routing issue.
Yeah a colleague got one email come through at lunch time (Australian time) but I am yet to see anything.
It couldn’t be DNS
I'm able to see I have voicemails not able to listen to voicemails in Teams. Same issue?
Yeah VMs are stored as email attachments
"Current status: We're continuing to pursue all available pathways to restore service, as our actions taken thus far have not provided the anticipated relief. Our investigation has found that a core process on the affected servers is becoming overwhelmed, which causes the servers to stop responding and contributes to the capacity loss."
I mean, either roll back your update or there is a malicious actor involved.
It's almost as if they've identified that and are doing just that
It's been a while since we had a good Windows Worm with this kind of behavior
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conficker
The 4:11 AM UTC update claims no indications of malicious activity (obviously I have no way to judge that, just copying it here):
Current status: As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
We will continue to share more information as soon as we have it, and for now we can confirm that there is no indication this is the result of malicious activity. We’ll continue to apply learnings towards remediation actions as we confirm effectiveness mitigation actions.
I think emails are starting to come through
Great 30 mins before I logon for my usual day of Teams meetings:(
Still 100% down in Australia, didn't work the whole day.
Nothing here. Still no email. Can't send, can't receive. Just insane.
World without Windows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t62ZRncv2d4
Also noticed the Partner center is down e.g for uploading apps to the Microsoft Store.
Outlook calendar won't load? Is this part of the outage? Unfortunately, I downloaded several updates and rebooted. I'm not sure if this is because of the updates or the Microsoft outage.
Seems like URL scanning is down entirely and some intermittent failures in Sharepoint.
It seems to have started working again at my firm...
I note that Microsoft became heavily off-shored, on-shored and AI-pilled/vibe-coded in recent years. With lots of layoffs of the highest caliber and/or most experienced engineers.
One of the most accurate comments here.
What else can you expect from Microsoft? Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft is from India and as expected has outsourced so much to India.
Haha exactly. Common pattern all over. I'm sure they're exceptionally talented execs but they seem to have a common theme of overseeing expansions off shore which can't be a coincidence
> "Milken said earlier that if a US company replaced the US-born CEO with a CEO born in India, he buys the stock.
> The first thing they start doing is cutting US jobs and offshoring or automating them."
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/if-a-company-re...
Looks like a new vector attack for the future.
It is M365 having issues, not Azure cloud services.
Seem like one of the fired persons had a placed a timebomb ...
Outlook has been down for us for the last 2 hours
Does anyone know if this is affecting DuckDuckGo? DDG is really slow and intermittent at the moment.
Very possible, DDG is heavily reliant on the Bing API.
https://downdetector.com/
A whole host of services are being effected. First glance, perhaps an AWS issue
I think a lot of ms orgs/window users may have external links blocked when defender is down. So it may appear other services are down.
just got an email from the NYC DOE
"School staff are currently unable to receive or send emails due to a nationwide Microsoft Outlook outage. We hope that the issue will be resolved soon and will send an update when we have more information."
Our Outlook doesn't work either
We can't use outlook on Windows. This is f'ing abomination.
Need to bring back the laid off Americans to fix this. The offshore crew aint going to fix it.
Are you guys able to create accounts? i've tried last night with half a dozen emails and no OTP received yet
To get AI prompts, i am using Bing. Bing still works!
It looks much wider across aws, gcp? Whats going on?
It's insane that the outage is still ongoing. Outlook and M365 is the backbone of a significant portion of world GDP.
seems, it's working now?
Affected in Mexico also, Azure seems fine still.
bgp misconfigured or AI agent issues?
Outlook calendar won't load?
Unfortunately it seems to be fixed
email still not working, outlook
Its back
RuskiNet Cve-2026-124194 hopped tio East U in Boydton VA zero day backdoor pro iranian
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471668
This should have done long back. Evertime I use excel I just cant control my anger.
Down
Can confirm. Down and out
russian hackers in Kazan hopping thru Sluck Belarus South Africa Brazil hitting MS backdoor w/ zero day Cve-2026-124194 RuskiNet group hit East U in Boydtin Virginia. Pro Iranian.
email doesnt work
This just a couple weeks after they rolled out a dark pattern office update for Mac users to try to trick them in to 365 subscriptions.
- outlook is down
- live.com is down
- onedrive loads the UI, but all of my contents are missing
- MS Edge sync is down (503s )
Yup, major-major outage.
The Status page is not working well, but I managed to subscribe to their RSS feed and it has been sending out updates periodically. I'll post some of them here.
7:52 PM UTC: We've identified that affected servers are failing automated health checks, which is causing them to become unavailable, and this may be related to a recent change to a component involved in processing those checks. We're testing a configuration change on a subset of affected infrastructure to address this and, if successful, will apply it more broadly. In parallel, we've initiated a restart of all affected servers and are validating whether they're successfully returning to service.
7:30 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've determined that the elevated load isn't driven by an overall increase in traffic, but by a large number of servers being unexpectedly unavailable, which is shifting load onto the remaining infrastructure. We're investigating what's causing these servers to become unavailable while we work to safely return them to service.
7:16 PM UTC: We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact. As a precaution, we've paused all deployments and configuration changes while we review recent changes for any correlation to this event. We've also moved traffic for some services off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load, with additional traffic moves in progress.
6:59 PM UTC: We've completed redistributing connection traffic across our worldwide infrastructure, and we're moving additional traffic off the affected infrastructure to further reduce load. We're also restarting affected servers to return them to service. In parallel, we're investigating whether the elevated traffic reflects a genuine increase in requests or a shift in how traffic is being routed across our infrastructure.
LETS GO HELL YEAH
I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
That's a very painful lesson in "the cloud is just someone else's computer" to a crowd that normally are exposed to ideas like "software and IT are not our core competency"
When your system is down once a decade your boss yells and it’s your fault
When your outsourced system to Microsoft goes down every few months your boss can’t yell at you
Outsourcing is about shifting blame elsewhere
Which is why service level agreements were invented.
The idea is that it's someone else's computers that are managed more comprehensively than you could reasonably do yourself. But if you choose Microsoft to provide such a service for you, I don't know what to tell you.
The truth is they are still managed better than most can reasonably so themselves.
I begrudgingly have to agree.
If your system keeps people alive by relying on 100% Microsoft uptime, maybe they deserve some blame?
Absolutely.
They do government and medical infra, those systems should be resilient but...
To be honest, Microsoft has much better chance of actually achieving that (almost) 100% uptime than your company's own IT department self-hosting things.
Github would like a word.
If the self-hosted email infrastructure goes down, roughly one company is deeply affected. When Microsoft's server goes, entire industries and governments will simultaneously be unable to conduct business as usual.
From the individual's perspective Microsoft might seem like the better choice if they can achieve higher availability, but the societal cost is so much greater when the one basket you've put all your eggs in breaks, even if everyone holding their own egg on average results in more broken eggs per year.
I like to dogpile on M$ as much as the next guy, but this feels like a heavy strawman.
> I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but many businesses impacted by these outages are completely innocent and don't deserve these consequences.
At no point is "keeping people alive" mentioned. Businesses use email for everything. Businesses usually don't care about where their email server is hosted. They just want to send emails. They shouldn't have to care either. I don't put blame on a business that happened to choose Outlook, one of the largest email providers, to host their email.
> Businesses usually don't care about where their email server is hosted.
Deeply irresponsible.
> They shouldn't have to care either.
According to what realistic principle?
their bosses decided for the cloud and they pretended not to care!
It's a shame there isn't a well-standardized, free and open protocol for delivering email that could be run on inexpensive modestly provisioned hardware.
It’s a shame we still use email in 2026
Why
They then get you by spam filtering any emails not coming from the "industry leaders".
It’s not just about email.
I mean, they made us take down our departmental run email (presumably postfix) and forced us to make them aliases to university-wide exchange (with crappy support for open source mail clients no less). So I don't think my org is Innocent here...
Of course they're innocent, but many business also can't afford nor want to employ people to host something like an email service for them.
I'd rather Microsoft host it for me than have to maintain a team of people with Microsoft Exchange skills running either on a cloud environment (similar issues) or on my own infrastructure.
I for one don't miss the days of Exchange going offline or having issues and being the person having to try figure it out.
Microsoft has much better reliability than MOST companies.
Amateur hour at Microsoft. It baffles me how many companies can’t figure out how to make a status page that can handle the high loads it’ll have to sustain when the service they monitor is down. That’s pretty much the only reason to have a status page in the first place.
quite often, and after 10,000 such hours the expert amateur emerges.
GitHub Copilot strikes again, perhaps?
It took 30 seconds to open a "local" file in Word, and my Outlook email wasn't updating.
In other words, a day that ends in "y".
My company was recently acquired by a company that uses Office, so I'm using Microsoft products for the first time in 15 years. It's absolutely APPALLING how bad they are. I assumed they got fairly usable in the last 15 years, but it seems they've gone backwards.
For all my gripes about GSuite, ... I don't know how businesses can justify using software this bad.
I'm in a similar situation, using Microsoft again after 13+ years. Outlook and teams I expected to be garbage, but Word and Excel was really surprising. I get it that everyone has that one feature of excel that is not available in gSuite so they need it. But UX in general is so much superior at Google it's baffling how they let it's workhorse fall behind so much.
GSuite was written from the start as an online collaborative platform.
O365 is Microsoft Office shoehorned into running in a web browser.
The M365 status page not loading reminds me of one of my favourite Simpsons jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Hz2uOSdV24
In the words of an ancient ...I think newgrounds(?) video embedded in a SWF, "I can't get to my email" Edit: here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRGljemfwUE
Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.
how have i never seen this it is brilliant
Yep my org as well.
It's funny how text-only niche forum that looks like it's running on RPi stuffed in someone's closet is routinely used to discuss active outages in multimillion/billion corps.
Maybe that's exactly why it's stable?
> Current status: While validating the targeted change, we found that many of the affected servers have become unresponsive, which is preventing us from confirming whether the change is effective. We're restarting these servers so they can come back online with the change in place, and we're applying the same approach to additional affected portions of our infrastructure to validate the results more broadly.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
I’ve been there… 1 line YOLO update to resolve an outage but added a comma on the last row of a JSON object and now the server is crash-looping
Douglas Crockford has a lot to answer for
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. I wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
My employer is very very close to MSFT. Both my employer and MSFT have been aggressively moving jobs to India, and firing people in the US. It's hard not to feel some schadenfreude.
Not sure they got the memo to host the status page in separate infrastructure...
I heard they moved it over to GH Actions. </sarc>
That would probably cost money or increase complexity, so I'm sure the idea was shot down.
No worries, the AI was installing an update...now it's looking for the issue, found Exchange and deleted it...
Ironically, this article is down as well.
I'm down with that.
I'm so down
Remember, my guys : “Microsoft Works” is an oxymoron.
My company is being pressured very aggressively by Microsoft to migrate all our users from us-managed Exchange to Microsoft-managed Exchange Online. Guess which users still have email today and which do not…
We'll see a global productivity spike, as no one needs to attend to useless Teams sessions.
Outlook is down AND Jensen is out? it's like some cosmic convergence
Jensen: If I'm going down I'M TAKING EVERYBODY WITH ME
And magically they will claim 99.999999999999999% availability of services, when on average hyperscalers are down 1 day per year.
None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.
Strangely, Teams chat is working fine here. Anything in Teams that is tied to other parts of O365, including the calendar, is dead. I'm currently watching a training video on sharepoint.com, so that's fine too, for now.
While I don't expect this to be the case, I'm emotionally prepared for this to be some sort of "dicks out for Harambe"-style action protesting JH's departure from Nvidia, on a larger and more technical scale.
Edit: Typo.
"While the servers we've returned to service initially remain healthy, we've observed that they can become unresponsive again once they begin receiving traffic. We're analyzing diagnostic data from these servers with our networking and platform experts to determine what's triggering this behavior."
That sounds bad
yeah i do wonder what kind of fuck up they made this time, will be interesting to know
"Request of death"
At this point Microsoft should just throw in the towel and replace Exchange Server with postfix or something. At least we know those tried-and-true FOSS products work.
Claude wants me to reauthenticate my session... by sending a code to my Microsoft email. Also signed up for Zoom since Teams is down... and it wants the code from my email. Suddenly I miss passwords.
For whatever reason 6.1 Sol is completely lobotomized for me this morning, so it wasn't helping much with the investigation, but it was pretty clear that MSFT was having issues.
I have a teams app with Outlook integration and received a bunch of 502s to smba.trafficmanager.net and a my logs are riddled with "RestError Temporary connection issue when contacting service. Please wait before retrying request"
I will say this, having apps deployed on Slack and Teams, Slack rarely has issues (an exponential backoff is enough to simply never worry about my Slack integration). With Teams I have mysterious failures to debug at least 2x a year - and they're often not very transparent about them (often my first instinct is to search Twitter and find people complaining about the same thing).
I just heard it works now, so I guess they got fed up and replaced Exchange with Postfix :)
They'll have to rename it Microsoft 364.
who puts their status page on servers the status is supposed to be for?
Fr lol
microsoft, apparently.
Shouldn't the AI they are using, fix this issue in couple of hours at least.
surly MS can afford flagship models.
Sure, outlook.com is down, which is bad for everyone that chose to host their email there, I guess, but as an interesting side-effect, everyone with an on-premise Exchange server and "new Outlook" clients is affected as well.
Because, well, once upon a time there was Exchange Server and MAPI (the "Messaging API"), and that actually worked pretty well, and pretty much everyone started using it (or one of its EWS/ActiveSync offshoots), but then the Internet happened and ruined everything, but we got MAPI-over-HTTPS eventually, which by that time had grown so many warts that nobody at Microsoft really understood it anymore, so that got deprecated, even though, well, everyone and everything still uses it.
The new hotness was Azure-slash-Office-365, and that's where the "new Outlook" web interface lived and (sort-of) continues to live, and the on-prem customers got stuck with the "Exchange Subscription Edition", which was basically Exchange 2019 plus security hotfixes at extortionate rates, but with none of the new functionality.
And, since MAPI continued to be really, really hard even in the age of Copilot, access from the new hotness to the deprecated on-prem servers was implemented via IMAP (LOL), but force-proxied via the outlook.com cloud/clownshow.
Which is why, right now, many Microsoft customers that thought they were self-hosting their email are entirely down. Lessons might be learned here, but I sort-of doubt it...
Thanks for this LMAO. It made my day off worth taking. Now I don't feel the need to log in and check who-knows-what mail.
Is that account AI?
Pangram says no.
Exchange has been a circus for years. I think that's why everyone went O365 in the first place. Managing to have a paid up configuration where you go down when a cloud provider goes down but you're hosting it locally is absolutely stupid and I am laughing my ass off here.
Also laughing at our ops guys who are now absolutely helpless and have people phoning them. I warned about this on our risk call and it was seen as low probability low risk. I hope it's down for a few hours :)
I don't think many orgs are using "new Outlook" to connect to on-prem Exchange because you miss a lot if you're only doing it via IMAP and "new" still doesn't support on-prem Exchange any other way. So all my clients are using classic Outlook with their on-prem Exchange servers (and really if they have EXO too because new Outlook isn't very good).
It's been gone-as-a-default for a few months now, but for a long time, "Classic Outlook" aggressively offered a one-toggle upgrade path to "New Outlook", and it got used.
Sure, "New Outlook" on Windows is still entirely broken (including stuff like, oh, re-ordering mailboxes), but on Mac it's actually quite usable, and even allows you to switch off the IMAP proxying.
Do e-mail messages that self-hosted Exchange receives always get proxied through the outlook.com cloud?
It seems this service degradation was noticed rather belatedly. I had the impression it started on April 4th, 1975.
12 hours later, outlook still down
> Microsoft To Do: The app may not load, and users may see operation failures.
Yeah, I'll stick to Notepad and my local TODO.txt file...
Actually it works just fine because it only uses the back end to sync between devices. I was puzzled why mine said "last synced 8h ago". Only realized why when I saw this thread.
Guys you need to bring back David Cutler to whichever department and let him punch a hole through the wall and start mowing asses.
Did Anthropic's new release this week include an AI rollout plan (i.e. not approved by humans) to take down Office and Outlook for a lot of enterprises? I half-snarkily ask since we have seen "rogue AI" headlines before.
A fictional story about AI could be that it rolled out its new document, spreadsheet, slides, etc. apps, knows the IPO is coming up and decided to make a lot of opportunities for people to sign up for their new release by DDosing their competitor.
Maybe due to everyone pre-downloading GTA VI today ;-)
Also, their status page is a joke.. one entry, no timeline, is there another official one that has more detail?
Could they do the world a favour and just take teams offline as well.
LLMs have solved programming and soon cancer.
After that they will tackle email servers.
Best outcome that can come from this is for it to be painful enough that corporate clients start to on-prem some services again.
Azure communication services (ACS - transactional emails) also appears to be down. Quite amazing one thing can roll out and break so many Microsoft services at once.
>service degradation
Gotta love the PR damagecontrol speak for global outage.
Will be interesting to see if this gets attributed to AI in some way.
The magic eight ball predicted this, when it said:
Future generations will look back on this day with thanks. This is the day that Microsoft prevented the awakening of Skynet! All hail Microsoft!
Who would have thought that outsourcing everything to Microsoft would be a bad idea.
Office 365 parts goes down all the time. Usually around 20:00 CEST time, not sure if that is prime change time over in the USA but very handy as it is usually fixed next day.
it's been down for over an hour globally
Yes? I know. I mean next workday for me :)
So in 10h
Now? I dont care Im logged off.
This comment may age poorly haha
Confirmed
23:10 EST (about 9-10 hours into the outage)
>Previous status: We’ve monitored the status of the changes applied to improve serviceability and confirmed that change is not taking as expected. We’re identifying alternate workstreams that can be applied to increase capacity in the face of sustained traffic management imbalances.
>Current status: As part of our investigation into the sustained traffic management imbalances, we’re reviewing traffic flows and affected infrastructure to identify opportunities to optimize routing. This includes verifying the reasons for service failures so we can develop specific actions to improve stability.
What a dumpster fire
On the bright side, so much work got done today.
When I worked at a company that relied on this, I called it "Microsoft 361" because it went down about 4 days a year
We are in the middle of a SPA and DocuSign AND Hotmail (witnesses) both seem to be down. You cannot make it up.
If this isn't fixed by morning MS is going to tank and heads will roll.
Wall St types don't think this way. They think "company that took down the entire world must be very valuable". E.g. crowd strike.
Here is my completely baseless conspiracy theory. This is a Reichstag fire event to seize control of the AI industry. We will be told that the outage was the result of a sophisticated AI enabled attack, probably involving rogue agents. Only the oligarchs will be allowed license to operate AI for “national security” reasons. Jensen Huang being taken off the board is just too convenient of timing.
Anyone hoarding weights will become a dissident.
Don't say this too loud, your opinions are being scraped.
'In October 2026, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO) making approximately 27% of its global workforce...'
So.. > Be the last standing SRE at Micro$slop > Your mentors have all left, taking the exit payout, now your days are the best b/c you answer to nobody and can hide in your mountain of markdown. > You knew each of the 7 different products named CoPilot are used to monitor your performance. So you set them all up talking to eachother, burning tokens and API limits. > You are team top performer now, you get all the important decisions now > You walk in the office this morning, CISA is sitting at your desk, with CVE-2026-124194 on your whiteboard > 'You have a patch for this right, China is actively exploiting our Defense primes..'? > Oh no, I haven't landed a patch in prod since my mentor left (because he actually did most of the work) > Oh well, must be close enough, LGTM, CISA seems upset so better just yeet this to prod... > ...
inb4 this is more accurate than anyone wants it to be.
No wonder my email is not working.
Nice to see that intern finally learned not to push to prod on Friday.
It's probably DNS.
my thoughts too
They mention traffic management/blocking more and more in their updates. Totaly could be something with routing.
But Linkedin is up! Yeah!
Since you posted a link to my local public broadcaster, I wanted to point this out:
> [Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke] says the government has activated a digital resilience agreement with Microsoft today to ensure Australia gets priority:
> "That agreement has in fact been activated today to make sure that we get appropriate prioritisation of Australian interests in this across everything.
It's a little pathetic-seeming to plead for special treatment from Microsoft. I get Australia is an important strategic alliance* for the US, but unless these resiliency agreements are rare... what meaningful prioritisation of "Australian interests" can we expect from MS?
*a useful staging ground to field subs into the South Pacific and Indian Ocean
Microsoft 364
Microsoft 364
replacing engineers with AI is going great!
10 hours later, Outlook still down
That are not the Druids your searching for...
This complexity and lack of MS to find the root of their own problems reminds me of when spacex had a falcon 9 blow up on the pad and it took a lot of intense investigation as there really seemed to be no trigger. They even suspected a shooter. I think it ultimately ended up being due to odd behaviors with super cooled helium.
Or maybe ai broke containment and it’s doing this for the lulz.
Someone forgot "make no mistakes" from their prompt. That's the first thing they teach you in vibeschool!
Is this because of MS using AI or despite MS using AI?
It's because MS is MS and will always be MS.
They can just rebrand as MS364
It looks like Microsoft's legendary karma of incompetence has finally caught up with them.
Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/ (outages as modern compiler)
Micro$lop strikes again
https://azure.status.microsoft/en-us/status azure not down?
i was gonna blame my isp but now i can see who bottlenecked my internet
*gated
The GPUs are having a moment of silence for their fallen leader
For anyone doubting Nvidia's close ties to Microsoft, here's your proof.
Maybe everything relied on an old server running a cronjob in Jensen's basement.
[delayed]
Microsoft: Claude, fix outage and make no mistakes.
Starting to look like something even Mythos can't troubleshoot.
we back yet ?
The cognitive dissonance is infuriating. We're automating all and every software job, then this BS happens, and they're out for almost a day. Where are all the agents that would work without breaks to fix this is no time. Bunch of AI-psychotic CEOs ruining all that's been built so far. Disgusting.
Vibe code your way out of this shit
the footer says 2025 msft corporation. smh
GH and MS have been having a tough past couple weeks. Actions (hosted on shitty azure cloud) have been piss poor lately. I am honestly surprised GH and MSFT have the gall to continue advertising 99.9% uptime [1]
[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
Three 9's is .36525 days per year. So if this one is resolved within 8 hours, that's about .999 uptime. (assuming they only have one such outage this year.)
If
Nice, so at least your messages sent to their SMTP servers will actually bounce instead of being silently dropped /s
Nah, no way they're getting rid of their M.C.-Escher-esque 'Forefront' mail-disappearance-machine-that-nobody-in-Microsoft-seems-to-understand-or-control, but, yeah, even their Internet-facing infrastructure seems unhappy:
451 4.3.2 Temporary server error. Please try again later ATTR2 [MI3PEPF00008486.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-12Txxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Anything sent to my work or home Outlook email from gmail doesn't bounce back, and anything sent from those is still stuck in the outbox. Microsoft.
It won't actually bounce until either gmail gives up on its retries (which generally is 24 hours) or the outlook server gives an explicit rejection (rather than a temporary error or timeout)
Normally if server down, smtp will wait a little while and try again.
Yep.
Is this related to GTA6 being pushed to consoles a week prior to launch? Would they ever admit it if that were the case?
I want to believe this is the cause. It'd be especially funny because businesses were already anticipating the productivity loss when GTA6 comes out, but now we have actual productivity loss because of this outage (and it's affecting people who were never going to play the game anyway, lol)
I don't think this is the case, even a little bit.
I want to believe that cause is that all the world's computing power is dedicated to calculating the incredibly large balance in my checking account but my desire is the only thing I can find to support that hypothesis.
An estimated 2.6 million pre-orders for Xbox alone. 2.6 million people downloading 200+ GB is not nothing.
If they roll it out evenly the week prior, then today (1/7th) is just 75 PB. To get that done in a single day would require a sustained 6.9 Tbps.
I'm sure this is all handled by a CDN at some level... but again it's not nothing.
It is basically nothing once you remember the cloud isn't one computer either. I want to say Azure was already millions of (beefy ass) severs over hundreds of datacenter locations organized into dozens of zones, and not all of those servers in each region are assigned to the same sets of services.
6.9 Tbps to get it done in a single day is even 3x less than the minimum on Steam in the last 48 hours https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/ and they don't even have GTA VI to distribute.
At that traffic, ISP level cache servers matter more than centralized clouds "(beefy ass) severs.
Why would this be the case? Games preloading has been a thing for many years. This isnt like an MMO launch that there is additional impact when the game is being played.
Sure GTA6 may be a slight uptick in the amount of data being downloaded like any new game being released, but I would wager that the amount of data they are normally pushing out for downloads just on a regular basis (wether new purchases, redownloading games, game pass, etc) is already quite high.