Global Microsoft Outage | Hacker News Reader

Global Microsoft Outage

cnn.com

293 pointsTechTechTech183 comments

Still ongoing, I haven't been able to access my personal outlook email for 12+ hours and as a result can't access my accounts that use email 2FA, including my virtual medical appointment!

Along with the daily Github outages recently, it's making me do an audit of my dependence on Microsoft.

Bizzare. My self hosted email, which everyone told me was stupid to host myself has been sending and receiving just fine.

Of course I haven't received a single email because every important email is sent via Microsoft but I still feel superior because I'm not affected

Just don’t tell us how many nines you have, hey?

I mean, I can't speak for him but I also run a small server and I think I just beat MS365 in nines because of this outage.

My non-mirrored Synology NAS full of movies just beat MS365.

My phone has had a higher uptime than MS365 over the period from the last major 365 outage to this one, and that includes turning it off at the theatre

infinitely many, so far...

It is not difficult to keep a mail server online.

FreeBSD(ZFS+jails old but gold) + postfix + dovecot.

Ha nearly the same setup here, FreeBSD/ZFS/opensmtp/dovecot/rspamd

And yes uptime (with short outages(updates etc)) is not that important for a mail-server, since the sender re-transfers in intervals (mine is 5min the 8 then 15 then 60 then 180 then something up to 2days)

So the uptime for the service is 100% (maybe 99.999) over the last 8 years.

Mail servers are easy, getting the other mail servers (Microsoft,Gmail,etc) to play nice with yours is harder.

Not that hard, for example thats a good tester:

https://mail-tester.com/

and

https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ (offline atm Azure??)

Getting a clean ip is hard. I have my personal email server setup and had to get it off of some black lists maintained by baracuda. Although i agree personal self hosted email is fairly straightforward and ideally more people should do it. Hetzner provides cheap and reliable vms.

>Hetzner provides cheap and reliable vms.

True, i have some hetzner (not vm's but metal), and Vultr (just vm's), i just had one bad IP until now (i just changed it instead of trying to get it removed from a blacklist)

I should've perhaps done that, but i got an additional static ip from them which i pay for so i thought it would've been a good one, then getting off of the blacklist was easy once you have dmarc and dkim and spf. So i kept it.

Reliable is a flexible word. Hetzner does frequent, albeit often brief, maintenance operations that would incur a down time on a high-throughput live service. Not impossible to design around with enough redundancies, but far from "I have one FreeBSD box that's been up for 467 days with 100% uptime" that people used to brag about in the early 2000s. I have few VPSs and bare metal instances that I just `sudo reboot` when there is a kernel update with practically "zero" impact or downtime for myself. Something unimaginable to do in a production system where you need to cordon, traffic drain, update, reboot, uncordon then orchestrate that across an entire fleet of instances with different roles and characteristics in a specific order.

Not relevant for a self hosted mail server..

Isn’t that what I said?

I found it to be fairly easy to be honest.

Uptime is not the hard part for self hosting email.

Every time the cloud koolaid come in to defend the latest drop of a SAAS system from 99.9 to 99% they seem to think it's impossible to run a self hosted service with a better uptime.

It's not, it's easy. We've been doing this stuff for years.

Doing it at billion user scale is hard. You are not google.

Maybe trying to do it at billion user scale isn't such a great idea after all.

  root@mail  ~  uptime
 11:57:30 up 2114 days,  4:36,  2 users,  load average: 0.20, 0.26, 0.61

Receiving is easy for personal mail I would say I receive 99% of the time.

Sending out is harder but that 1% when I send something I need it delivered.

Hosting e-mail for friends and family is harder and mostly what I would call stupid.

The solution is to send via some transactional email provider (aka amazon ses).

My iCloud email account is working just fine too. Security through obscurity ;)

> Still ongoing, I haven't been able to access my personal outlook email for 12+ hours and as a result can't access my accounts that use email 2FA, including my virtual medical appointment!

I guess software is still not solved, I'll let Dario know

You mean a Microsoft 365 account?

Because "personal outlook" at https://outlook.live.com/mail has been working this whole time.

Because I know people here are devs but you guys dont know IT lmao

It might work for you in your region. It is down in my region for some time.

Interesting because it was down here in Sweden.

365 that is

Peronal outlook has been fine

This link is not loading up for me, and neither does outlook.office.com, it times out after a while.

its so funny, that service outages might help people get away from american hyperscalers.

Nothing will change. Nobody who is in a decisionmaking position will learn any lesson from this.

If you take a big corp down for a day then decision makers definitely notice.

I'd guess that almost every CEO affected asks themselves whether they should be so reliant on Microsoft.

Given that MSFT is down just 1.5% pre-market after what surely must be one of their biggest outages in the past decade, no one thinks much will come of this.

1.5% is basically random intra-day fluctuations.

they didn't every single other time something similar happened so why would this time be different?

And then switch to what? Exactly.

Stalwart hosted on OpenBSD?

Running what shared calendar, file and video meeting system?

Stalwart already has calendars and contacts. Zulip works great for Slack-style collaboration and has easy integration with many videoconferencing providers. OwnCloud is great for files and office-style collaboration. All can be integrated with LDAP.

Cool, let's just rip out existing infrastructure, retrain entire IT staffs on obscure products they've never touched and pray that they all just work. I'm sure someone in charge of a budget will just love the sound of that!

Nah, let’s just stay on someone else’s vibecoded infrastructure that we have no control over and see how that goes moving forward.

You think those apps you just rattled off are immune to vibe-coding?

Officially Microsoft 364

Lmao

Still ongoing, I don't think I remember such a long outage!

IRN, SEIM logs reporting a high incidence of telnet connections to port 25

Yet another risk of 2FA that most people don't realize.

Only email. TOTP is working perfectly well, as are passkeys.

Email and SMS are the most retarded 2FA in the wild. If the code isn't generated in a device you own, then you don't have control over it

I've had two ex-colleagues contact me this morning in UK government positions and tell me that they're still out of action with no plan B in place.

I hope this sort of stuff pushes us to a distributed model rather than a centralised mono-provider one.

Crowdstrike crashed 8 million+ machines and broke many so bad they didn't fix on restart. Their stock is up 3x since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou... . I don't understand it but I also wouldn't bet on anything changing from this outage.

Yeah true. Only by heel dragging and refusing to roll it into our production stuff lead to us surviving that.

Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical.

So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much.

However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future

Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.

If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc. However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.

A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.

Even 72 hours isn’t enough - how will they conduct business with anyone else if they are still down and how will they get their old emails to resume conversations and how will they transfer their known email addresses or inform others of their new email addresses? None of that is cheap or easy.

what big businesses use provider-domain email addresses that would necessitate new email addresses just for switching mailserver hosting?

It must be 15–20 years now that Mimecast has been offering a protective layer around email services like Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365. Even today, you can see companies that are still able to keep their email running during Microsoft outages because they have Mimecast's email continuity service in place. It shows the value of having that extra layer of resilience.

> switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical

Switching to what though? It's not like we didn't have outages before SaaS. It just happened at different times throughout the year in stead of all having an outage at the same time.

I feel like the big difference right now is that management can't call the EoD for progress updates every 10 minutes, they just have to assume that someone at Microsoft is working on fixing the issue.

Indeed, realistically in 2026 switching from Microsoft to Gsuite, those are the only two things I've ever seen companies use, and Google doesn't have 100% uptime either.

So yes that's another argument to not do anything and stick with Microsoft unless things become terrible

Regular businesses sure, but governments, public and essential services should have different criteria imo and should rethink their reliance on these services.

It should, but knowing UK gov they'll instead pay Accenture and IBM £10bn for a backup system that'll take 15 years and never get delivered.

Exacly, because 10B is big enough that everyone involved can get a bit of slice from it... Corruption is astronomical these days.

It's usually worse. They spend it in many £500k consultancy blocks asking how to fix something, get a report back, don't implement it and then the staff who were working on it get a position in another part of the government.

Beat me to it. But not before the National Email Resilience Review Committee is formed first, chaired by Lord Stoate Coate, announced with great fanfare. Obviously separate from the 1300 existing general cyber resilience review committees. Now then, very well, chaps and what have you, carry on, yees? (rolling Rs necessarily).

It's ironic that the Internet was designed to accommodate nuclear war and we still decided to consolidate so much critical infrastructure onto monoliths.

Internet is working perfectly fine, it's the services that run on top of the Internet that are failing

SMTP is a protocol designed back when machines might connect once a day to exchange email. It was designed to work during intermittent connectivity, queue messages, and recover gracefully. We instead decided we like instant rather than reliable by putting all our emails in one basket and then forgot that it doesn't have to be that way.

I mean why is outlook even centralised? If a company has 600,000 employees, why don’t they get their own infrastructure? Why is it all dependent on central Microslop infrastructure in America

That is exactly the question that needs asking and answering.

Because microsoft sort of pushes you into it.

It's a pain to administer.

Not nearly as much pain as those who stand to benefit from outsourcing mail services would like you to believe.

I have administered both Exim and Exchange and would very much like not to do so again. Especially since in the time since then the number of requirements for effective delivery and antispam has only gone up.

So have I and I agree with regard to exchange which I kicked to the curb as soon as possible. Exim? A breeze. Spam? Not a problem at this moment ]1] nor has it been for the last 10 years or so, filters are effective and low- to no-maintenance. The real fight now lies in getting your mail accepted by the likes of Microsoft and Google but that isn't as hard as it is made out to be. Annoying? Yes, it is a hurdle which needs to be taken. Once configured correctly it doesn't need any maintenance other than keeping DNS configuration up to date but that needs to be done anyway. Every now and then they come up with a new anti-competitive^Wspam scheme for which something needs to be configured somewhere but that's about it. I spend maybe 2-3 hours per year in maintenance of the mail system, time well-spent in my opinion.

[1] ...but LLMs have the potential to change that for the worse

Paying employees -> bad. Paying corporations -> good.

As if this isn't solvable with automation.

It's on days like this that Microsoft could really learn a thing or two from Google's SRE culture. These large tech companies have far too many internal dependencies, creating massive blast radii when something goes wrong.

Because there’s more to Microsoft 365 than email and there are no good solutions for the non-email parts.

Maybe use a decentralized protocol, something like SMTP...

All good until you run it all in the same business :)

Rather smug with my separate SMTP/IMAP provider now. And hourly offline backups of the mailboxes.

LXMF FTW

The reality for most companies, up until now at least, is that if they manage email servers themselves they will have more annualized downtime than if Microsoft does it. Of course if this outage lasts long enough (who knows what's going on over there), that will stop being true.

IMHO a bigger concern is that Russia hacked Microsoft in 2022 and China hacked Microsoft in 2023. Even that wasn't enough to scare companies off MS.

Basically, MS customers are locked in, the cost of migrating to anything else is huge, and there's a "no-one gets fired for buying MS" herd mentality, so MS has little to lose no matter how hard their product fails, just like Cloudstrike.

There's also the question of what alternative would really be better, or at least more reliable. My impression is that Google's infrastructure and engineering are genuinely better, but I'm recently ex-Google so take that with a grain of salt.

That's really not true though. That's what the cloud companies told us.

We've had more downtime from all our SaaS and cloud services in the last year than the 20 years before when self hosting.

When we self hosted, we very rarely had an unplanned outage. It really shouldn’t happen all the time. Plus I could work planned outages around the company’s schedule.

Now it feels like something is always down.

That's all predicated on having a team of people with the appropriate knowledge of how to securely self host an email system. Some organisations aren't big enough for that to be worthwhile, others have decided to forego that cost to let the cloud providers pick it up.

Email is not a particularly easy thing to reliably host and secure for a sizable organisation, especially if its not your main focus.

Annualized outage minutes is the wrong metric. If my company's email is down for fifteen minutes, twice a day, at 2am and 3am, that's over a week of downtime. But we might not even care.

If I lose a whole day, we lose all the productivity for that day and delay countless upstream and downstream efforts by a day.

The distribution of those minutes matters.

That's true, but it's more true for some companies than others. A lot of big companies cross time zones.

I suppose "unplanned outage minutes" would be a better metric. I still expect most companies to be worse on that metric. Most companies are just bad at running services reliably, especially when it's not their core business.

My small US gov org has been pushing more of our infra into centralized Microsoft services. The rationality seems to be that outages would be worse if we managed our own stuff. Nobody trusts each other and choosing Microsoft is an easy way to shift the blame outside the org. Nobody ever gets fired for choosing Microsoft and any issues they have must be justified.

It’s mental that the entire thing is centralised. Why don’t big clients have their own servers? They’re paying a fortune every year.

The fact that the government can get taken down by a central server is mental.

Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?

> Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence

It’s Microsoft we’re talking about so I feel like the latter is a given, and the former is a reasonable assumption.

Jokes aside, it does seem that somehow these hyperscaler cloud providers who tout the reliability of their multiple zones and global distribution sure do seem to always have some central dependency or single point of failure. AWS for example seems to have a global outage once every year or two at this point, or like us-east-1 problems always seem to affect other zones too. You’d think with their scale these clouds would be completely decentralized and redundant but apparently not.

The problem with decentralized redundancy is that it requires separate update schedules and process controls. This directly conflicts with the desire for convenience in rolling out new updates and code changes, etc. so the single point of failure tends to be deploying new code to everywhere at once.

Google basically is at this point, right? Not perfect, and obviously some things like DNS, Authn, and load balancing can’t be completely isolated. But overall, I think they put a ton of thought into removing software and hardware dependencies between regions, maintainence planning, and designing systems that don’t have outages correlated between regions.

Keeping your own server(s) up, including spam control, is work that takes time and costs money. Microsoft is probably still cheaper than that,[citation needed] and has more resources to keep everything running than even a medium-sized government. So it is understandable.

Yes. M365 gives "free", secure emails in a scalable, hands-off way. The downside is it practically being a black box, making email issues undebuggable.

In a sense you're also paying for delegating responsibility. You can put the blame on Microsoft. Same way companies (internal project sponsors) pay consultants to take the blame if a projects fails.

It's been a while (~10y) since I administered windows servers, but I recall they were much harder to automate w.r.t. maintenance. So Microsoft created M365 to fill that niche and have organizations offload operational cost to them.

With a linux fleet can run via SSH/ansible and you can patch thousands of machines programmatically in minutes and control the deploy at a fine level. With Microsoft/Windows it often involves/d logging in to the one AD server where everything runs, back it up via 3rd party software, apply the patches and hope it doesn't break, and if it does, call MS support, because rolling back is really your last resort (I feel it's become better since 10y ago, but I don't have hands-on experience anymore).

Our company runs on-prem Exchange since 2019, and... well... it's a PITA to work with (Legacy Outlook/New Outlook), we downgraded from M365 and it was really a step down in terms of features and reliability. OTOH I guess it's keeping us afloat today when M365 is having a really bad day.

There isn't much if anything that can't be automated via Powershell and other methods. At this kind of scale, I would highly doubt that any of the servers running Exchange for EO are ever logged in interactively.

They’re paying a fortune every year.

You can run your own email easily and cheaply, but if you wan to run with a team big enough and experienced enough to recover quickly if there's a problem it gets expensive fast.

If everyone had their own servers, either they're centrally enough managed that they aren't really independent servers or the management overhead and chaos from version drift etc. creates a mess that overall lowers the reliability of the entire system. Sure, you won't have concentrated outages like this but your instance's overall uptime is likely to be lower.

Google Workspace isn't going to be any different.

Whatever. People did this shit for years with little downtime. Even with Microsoft's own products.

> Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?

LLM generated code and/or configs?

Also, while they claim it is not a cybersecurity attack (without saying how they know), these are exactly the kinds of things I would expect with the soon/maybenowww future of automated hacking agents wrecking world's cyber infrastructure. Right now, its embarrassing, when it happens to the banks, it will be something more than that.

Yeah it’s either a hack or someone slopcoded something that has broken the servers so badly that they can’t be restored.

It's a huge distributed system, they're not hard to break in weird ways.

Malice or gross incompetence isn't really required to break it, that's its natural state. You need high levels of competence to get it to work

A successful cybersecurity attack on a major email provider like Outlook or Gmail is an attack on the banks. Access to a user's email account gives attackers most or perhaps all they need to access their bank accounts.

yes, but only in a limited sense.

This take is bizarre and i’m really beginning to think that a scant few people are pushing it in bad faith in an attempt to spread rumours. It has no connection with reality. Extended downtime and faffing about with distributed systems issues all happen without it being caused by an attack.

When was the last time MS had such a large outage?

The timing is suspicious but could indeed be a coincidence.

One, coincidences happen all the time. Two, the world is always undergoing some sort of event that would make you go, "the timing is suspicious". There, distributed systems are hard.

No need for conspiracy here.

yeah. One coincidence. okay. Two coincidence, okay.. Three coincidence, all bets off.

Yesterday Outlook. Today FAA ground stop. Tomorrow ... well we'll see.

I could and probably am was wrong, but it is not bizarre, nor was I starting rumors. Starting rumors involves a little more than that. Rather it is a natural line of speculation given the times we are in, and the fact that, now well documented, AI hacking attacks are a thing.

I remember there was a comment from a MSFT-er talking about how unreliable Azure is. Combined with AI coding, is the whole thing collapsing under its own complexity and weight?

Azure is, ironically, mostly unaffected, and Microsoft's issues long predate AI coding, by like half a century almost.

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize...

one of the all time tech gossip blog posts

I went to a bank branch here in India today, and apparently their entire email + a bunch of other services are down. This is one of India's biggest banks.

Second-order effects of this are immense.

How is this not a bigger news? It's been on and (mostly) off for 14 hours.

It is literally at the top of the front page on all major news services.

Except in The Netherlands, where we have some political trouble.

Curious how such a worldwide issue can manifest, considering Microsoft usually has some pretty good geo availability mirroring?

Well, over here we vote each year for the next four years.

Even Facebook took itself down with a single configuration change. Mistakes happen.

Here in the UK it was on Radio 4 main news this morning and is the headline story for the online mainstream newspapers.

It's also got two stories on the BBC Home Page, including one which is live reporting.

It shouldn't be news in the first place, why do we all use such centralized systems where everything breaks down because of one bottleneck is the better question.

No one ever got fired for buying Oracle and Microsoft...

Getting buried by the Jensen Huang downfall. MS is super lucky it overlapped

We're seeing problems delivering to MS customers now. I'm not sure if it's they are full, busy, or perhaps rate-limiting to try and slow the deluge.

Last Error: 451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX3 NextHop: substrate-int.office.com. Last IP: [MI3PEPF00008491.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:15:37.721Z

Last Error: 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent server connections has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel [MI3PEPF00008487.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:42:55.252Z ]

We're also seeing messages about alternate failover failing.

Coming back online will be tricky now for Outlook, as everyone has a day's worth of emails queued up waiting to be delivered.

Why would any company as big as Microsoft choose to centralize software services so much that if something goes wrong, it effects everyone around the world?

If it goes wrong its bad for users.

As long as it works its good for them.

If everyone uses Microsoft and it goes down for Microsoft, nobody blames you, and you're at no disadvantage compared to them.

Much of the productivity gain from this AI boom came from shuffling off the expensive emphasis on robustness and reliability, and this downtime is just one of the externalities of this increase in developer productivity.

As evidenced by Crowdstrike stock quadrupling since it took down half the internet in 2024, vanishingly few people actually care about downtime like this.

Meanwhile, there is decades-long familiarity with Microsoft's product offerings which makes for generational vendor lock in.

I think this is just a new normal. Genuinely speaking, what percentage of businesses will de-Microsoft in the next year over this? I don't think it would even be 2%.

You have a good point, but maybe more will de-Microsoft than would have in the past. This is a more severe outage than Crowdstrike for most businesses. But also, LLMs might make it easier for businesses to identify alternatives and realize the transition.

Because not centralizing it means you now have countless separate environments that you need to manage, and if you manage them centrally, congrats, you reintroduced a SPOF again.

You can reduce the blast radius of outages at the cost of increasing the frequency a lot.

Outlook is back for me. Just in time when my Claude session expired. I wish Claude would allow login with password.

I am still broken with that, can't use outlook and claude code.

Claude is down.

Websites that don't support password (or passkey) login are infuriating. Sad to hear that Claude is one of them.

Claude has passkey support.

It's useless though. One passkey max. And login still requires email and there's no button on login page for passkey login. And it can't be f*ing removed. It's a joke. A trillion dollar company, lol.

Same with CVS. Once enrolled, no way to reset it.

Service is back in Japan if anyone wants to VPN and check their emails

Tried this. Took a while to load, but it did work.

This is why we have our own physical servers where I work. It's cheaper and more reliable.

ex msft (paid to leave in september).

worked on a service that plays a role here. I spent all my time working on infrastructure availability (ON CALL). only to be told during rewards that keeping livesite available is not impact and 'expected'

fucking idiots.

Would a secondary MX be useful here, at least for the receiving of mail?

How feasible would it be to quickly stand up an SMTP server and point your MX to it and get some mail while the outage is ongoing?

At any scale that unrealistic

An SMTP server is for sending / transferring mail. You’d need an IMAP/POP server that holds mail, setup accounts for everybody on your existing mail, provide access to all those users. It’s like asking how realistic is it to build outlook.com to cover the outage.

Unfortunally, this outage broke my entire work:

- No emails, calendar, file sharing, etc. - Claude Code broke as well because I cannot login back. - Multiple services I use with 365 are also broken.

With Europe now being fully woken up and still no emails working alongside Copilot this seems to be a rather more destructive issue then the last ones which mostly were solved at night and lasted ~8hours max in my memory.

We will also discuss and see how to failure proof our infrastructure against Microsoft outages. We made the mistake to base our VPN 2factor on Email. So now no VPN for anyone.

Email based 2FA is the devil.

Excessive 2FA in general is the devil. Making me dig out my phone from another room does not exactly make 2FA better.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471731

In Canada and still cannot refresh my Outlook email. Not sure what’s going on but it seems to be really big. Is there any insider stories?

What on earth was the cause? I couldn't get anything done all day today either.

cool, more skiing for you!

Guess I should build my own ski plates while I'm at it. Can't afford to buy them, though.

half our monitoring went dark for like an hour before anyone even noticed it was upstream not us

The Agentic Era.

"The company said it had “observed marginal success” in fixing the problem."

Truly next-level corporate speak.

Office 364, soon to be Office 363.

Too bad for msft 2026 wasn't a leap year

I guess some people who know how the system works decided to take that buyout package and Copilot is now in charge.

In the hands of god!

Finally getting email that was queued up for the day. Then I searched for coverage of the news outage and was led to https://www.newsweek.com/microsofts-outage-cut-quarter-workf...:

> ...

> Newsweek contacted Microsoft for comment via email.

I hope that was biting sarcasm so that those of us who are getting up with restored emails can have something small to smile about.

Microsoft decided to give a 1 day off globally to all Enterprise customers.

Thank you!

Damn. I should stop advocating for running important stuff on-prem. We should move all the things to azure!

They saw GitHub’s 93% uptime and decided to knock a 9 off theirs

sorry to be the one telling you this, but it is the same company

AI reducing productivity globally wasn't really the plan

People using sel-hosted emails, oss office apps like LibreOffice and Fileverse ddocs/dsheets are feeling a little smug right now.

Why every company in Europe uses a saas provider that’s run like a damn lemonade stand is beyond me.

if this winds up publicized as update-related, i would question the operational decisions taking place within Microsoft.

first - were the updates fully tested in a legitimate test environment? (robust mirror with proper configuration and data) or were they "modeled" on a digital twin?

second - did any canary deployment precede the full rollout which seems to have a performance/capacity issue that borks (highly technical term) servers under load?

third - regardless of the answers for the first two, given their release quality history, should someone be suggesting "hey, this could be an impactful change, we should roll it during a quiet period like 2am Sunday" to mitigate customer impact and provide a longer restoration window option?

or has Microsoft simply asked OpenAI to manage it all...?

Have they checked DNS?

move to the cloud its always up, they said

All eggs... meet one basket.

Microsoft OneDrive rename to OneBasket incoming

I think in the future, we need stable, minimal implementations of services: Minimal because a small attack surface is crucial in the age of AI and slop coding/attacks. Minimal also because core services, like the Unix philosophy, do one thing and do it well. We don't need big tech breaking core services by continuously pushing new 'features' (slop, surveillance-ware, ad trackers, etc.).

The future demands small, stable core services, and mail service should be a small core service commodity that has been defined and solved (protocol wise) a long time ago already - we only need to make it an accessible commodity for all without the big tech entanglement.

We need decentralisation coupled with a reliance on shared protocols, like we used to have before platforms took over everything and anti-trust legislation became meaningless.

The problem is that making a business out of "less" is hard. Especially when dealing with the hellscape that is "enterprise sales". Both the marketing people and the customer love piling on additional features!

Two decades ago I was at a startup that moved from a Linux email solution to a Microsoft one. Why? For the CEO's blackberry and calendar integration.

There are loads of FOSS email solutions and providers. There are fewer "email+calendar" providers, and there are even fewer "email+calendar+desktop logon SSO" providers.

And even fewer that let you see that visio presentation someone tried sharing with you over teams

Running a "simple stable core service" at this sort of scale is far, far harder and more complicated than you understand. Even responding to ICMP ping requests at AWS/GCP/Azure scale requires custom solutions. I've seen very many near-misses in high profile global services due to the complexity of running at this scale that have nothing to do with the causes you're assuming here.

ZOHO now has better uptime numbers. I'm on ZOHO. Cheap, works. But they disallow ZIP attachments which is why I still would never recommend them.

The Future is here they said, you will own nothing and be happy they said.

I'm sure this has nothing to do with vibe coding, vibe devops or losing institutional knowledge thanks to AI /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com