I’m no fan Outlook and what they’ve done for the world of email, but if they’re Rolls Royce and this outage is an engine failure then that’s an expected level of service?

Or they’re Boeing and this a 787 Max. I’m on the fence.

Also, multiple bankers I'm speaking to about Anthropic's IPO can't send or receive work e-mails. So that's a thing.

I don't expect a fundamental shift but the boss having no access to his mails certainly seems like something I would bring up quite a bit.

Barring corona & year end holidays, this is probably the closest we can get to a global work holiday.

I started digging into the historical blog posts, GitHub comments, etc. and I realised everybody at MS who'd been working on them, SWEs, PMs, architects, etc. had either left the company, or moved to other teams. And the one constant about the internal moves was that people were now working in some "AI" related project or product. Literally, I didn't find a single person who wasn't now working on AI.

Clearly, there has been a huge internal push to get into AI. Resources have been reallocated, and anything non-AI related has been starved. And since working on an AI project is probably considered the only route to advancing your career, anybody with any ambition has moved to a team doing something AI-related. The result is that huge numbers of products and teams doing vital but non-AI related work have been hollowed out, and now we're seeing the consequences.

WinUI 3.0, WinAppSDK, and related CsWinRT, C++/WinRT are in a ridiculous position six years after Project Reunion announcement, due to ever meagre resources.

XBox app keeps under delivering user experience, and bugs on patch Tuesdays are getting a joke by now.

All this in a four trillion valued company.

all 3!

Some problems are not solved by individual choice. If 30-40% of your important contacts use service that is down, your ability to work goes down dramatically.

I have currently important 3 daily contacts down they use MS services extensively contacted and said they can't do much of anything because their work process and the process of their contacts is down.

Quick lets collect all options people have to self host! in addition to docker-mailserver im aware of

- https://github.com/stalwartlabs/stalwart

- https://github.com/mailcow/mailcow-dockerized

The biggest issue has been so many security and approval flows depend on email, so all processes have ground to a halt.

Government I have no idea, but loads of businesses don't use Outlook - alternatives do exist. I've personally not used Outlook for well over a decade now.

Quick google AI mode check says:

- MS 365/Outlook: ~40%

- Google Workspace: ~25%

- Zoho: ~2%

And then a bunch of others - Rackspace, Zimbra, IBM WebSphere Lotus Notes Blue For Enterprise XML Watson Edition et al

The idea of paying for a backup system, or even having one on standby for situations like this is just not on people's minds, or if it is, it's simply not affordable because it would cost you too much compared to your competition.

Razor thin margins and generally getting away with it is what makes this work. Until it doesn't.

Sure, it makes sense for mission critical companies (utilities, emergency services), but I don't think it does for an average company. Especially that you don't take much blame if everyone is down.

But even this requires someone high up in the organization to have the insight that reliability requires some level of “inefficiency” — ie retaining certain highly paid staff, duplication of effort, over provisioning of resources, etc.

The irony is that the execs who could make those decisions are convinced that LLM tools obviate those needs, and shift all spare resources in that direction. But without heavy constraints from experienced humans, LLM tools will only multiply the complexity at the root cause of these sorts of outages.

frog boiling means that many never noticed how big (and therefore unspecialised) microsoft was until it was too deeply integrated

My guess is that having duplicate system would cost (in money for double subscriptions and lost productivity) much more than the benefit of being available 0.01% more. Especially for universities where almost nothing is really urgent and can't be delayed by a day.

Given the nesting of services at MS, the fractious org structure, and the length of service of some of these systems it was already a bit of a tinder-house.

AI just provided the accelerant, and while I don’t work at MS I can imagine they’ve lost some serious tenured talent over the last 5 years. I’d be surprised if anyone is left that actually understands how it’s all glued together.

Or rather, that might be the case before this outage. I suspect the org has relearned a fair bit over the last day.