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Ungh | on: Global Microsoft Outage
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.

RyanHamilton | parent | next
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.
ifwinterco | root | parent | next
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

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Ungh | root | parent
Yeah true. Only by heel dragging and refusing to roll it into our production stuff lead to us surviving that.
roca | parent | next
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.

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gpvos | parent | next
Maybe use a decentralized protocol, something like SMTP...
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AdamN | parent | next
It's ironic that the Internet was designed to accommodate nuclear war and we still decided to consolidate so much critical infrastructure onto monoliths.
sobiolite | parent | next
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.
Ungh | root | parent | next
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.
Borg3 | root | parent
Exacly, because 10B is big enough that everyone involved can get a bit of slice from it... Corruption is astronomical these days.
MisterMunchkin | parent
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
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dijit | root | parent | next
Because microsoft sort of pushes you into it.
Ungh | root | parent | next
That is exactly the question that needs asking and answering.
pjc50 | root | parent
It's a pain to administer.
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