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beowulfey 3 hours ago [-]
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.
no-dr-onboard 2 hours ago [-]
This is like getting transmissions from Cassini before it falls into saturn.
hammock 27 minutes ago [-]
Why is there not a single mention that this could be a cyberattack? Is the issue only affecting the USA?
crunkmcgoop 25 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
qsfp28 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
EvanAnderson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fock 30 minutes ago [-]
their employer brought me agent swarms supposed to take over my php-serving machines. whatever this is, I don't feel sorry for them.
eddythompson80 58 minutes ago [-]
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.
29 minutes ago [-]
28 minutes ago [-]
wmchen 3 hours ago [-]
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?
beowulfey 3 hours ago [-]
Ah no that was a mistake on my part! RSS Feed was in EST and I misremembered the difference
fock 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
3 hours ago [-]
dudus 3 hours ago [-]
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.
shermantanktop 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
burningChrome 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
semiquaver 2 hours ago [-]
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.
EvanAnderson 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
skeeter2020 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
codingdave 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
steve1977 2 hours ago [-]
Copilot hour!
6031769 3 hours ago [-]
At Microsoft every hour is amateur hour.
mapontosevenths 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fyrabanks 30 minutes ago [-]
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%
ifwinterco 24 minutes ago [-]
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
bradleyjg 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll get better after they layoff 60,000 people.
ahartmetz 4 minutes ago [-]
Don't worry, their replacements will receive very clear instructions instructing them to make no mistakes.
2 hours ago [-]
martinald 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely bizarre wording of these updates. Strangest corporate speak with urgency turned up to the max.
red-iron-pine 33 minutes ago [-]
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.
ArcHound 3 hours ago [-]
They are turning it off and on again. I don't even. If this works, our industry is cooked as the kids say.
onefiftymike 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ArcHound 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mapontosevenths 1 hours ago [-]
It's not a solution at all. It's a symptom.
justonceokay 3 hours ago [-]
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
jimmaswell 2 hours ago [-]
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.
bawolff 2 hours ago [-]
Amateur hour. Everyone knows professionals say "power cycling" instead to make it sound complicated.
red-iron-pine 32 minutes ago [-]
the layman understands both of those words and their meaning together.
we "bounce" the servers when on calls with customers.
jenimac926 3 hours ago [-]
They rolled back the 7:52 UTC update to the 730 one now....guess it didnt work
EvanAnderson 23 minutes ago [-]
As a data point: I just got a couple of automated Windows Defender vulnerability assessment notifications in my self-hosted email. That implies there's an unaffected portion of the infrastructure.
Outlook just popped an authentication dialog on me, too! That's more than it has been doing since 1300 Eastern.
I wonder if MSFT's corporate email is hosted outside the environment in a more "on-prem" style environment (i.e. dedicated Exchange installs for MSFT's use separate from the commercial offering). I can't imagine anybody inside MSFT would speak-up about it right now, but it would be interesting to know if they're fighting this thing w/o being able to use email themselves.
soundworlds 2 hours ago [-]
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."
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.
ifwinterco 18 minutes ago [-]
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
BLKNSLVR 27 minutes ago [-]
> these guys have the code!
But maybe don't understand it because they didn't write it themselves?
LadyCailin 22 minutes ago [-]
The one guy that did understand the code took VEO, and isn’t answering his phone right now.
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.
54 minutes ago [-]
jwnin 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
emschwartz 3 hours ago [-]
I'm amazed to see so many services down and to see that Github and Github actions are still working
mook 3 hours ago [-]
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.
emschwartz 3 hours ago [-]
I spoke too soon!
piker 2 hours ago [-]
So basically business as usual with the mac runners, right?
dist-epoch 2 hours ago [-]
Round robin. Github Actions were down yesterday.
rvz 3 hours ago [-]
For now.
One of GitHub's services will be down again by next week.
k_sze 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Telemakhos 3 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kspacewalk2 2 hours ago [-]
Or, you know, similar reasons as why people use Cloudflare as a reverse proxy.
rstupek 2 hours ago [-]
"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
ActionHank 3 hours ago [-]
This is your own fault for using their BS app.
ariamailclient 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
BLKNSLVR 19 minutes ago [-]
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.
amanaplanacanal 5 minutes ago [-]
What's your preferred email client? Just wondering what other people are using.
brokenmachine 31 minutes ago [-]
And I hope all of us have learned a valuable lesson.
nazgulsenpai 4 hours ago [-]
> 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?
anvuong 3 hours ago [-]
If Outlook can go down because of DDOS then it's a much worse problem.
canibalrex 1 hours ago [-]
If it would go away from a DDOS that would be a much better solution.
bitteralmond 3 hours ago [-]
My guess: too many DC resources dedicated to AI, leaving insufficient free capacity to handle traffic spikes
no, Copilot and Copilot Premium are products on the M365 platform, copilot is down too
ahartmetz 1 minutes ago [-]
Surely you mean Microsoft Copilot Premium for Copilot for M365 for Copilot.
For Copilot.
bix6 4 hours ago [-]
It’s actually O365 by Microsoft featuring Copilot by Bill Gates.
datadrivenangel 3 hours ago [-]
The Copilot O365 Gates, Bill G==B signature box
cidd 2 hours ago [-]
A Silicon Valley reference.
isomorphic 3 hours ago [-]
At this point Microsoft would be better off using Copilot to brand itself.
card_zero 3 hours ago [-]
Recursive self-promotion.
ingen0s 3 hours ago [-]
lol
browningstreet 52 minutes ago [-]
Nah, just a "Reply-All" chain at NVDA...
bombcar 3 hours ago [-]
>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 ...
BLKNSLVR 32 minutes ago [-]
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.)
stn8188 2 hours ago [-]
At first I thought you meant the traffic increase had something to do with free software :/
cuu508 2 hours ago [-]
Certainy not Unix!
junga 55 minutes ago [-]
CNU?
reaperducer 3 hours ago [-]
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.
lossolo 3 hours ago [-]
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."
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
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.
drillsteps5 39 minutes ago [-]
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.
kabdib 2 hours ago [-]
Is this a case of "who shall healthcheck the health checker?"
4 hours ago [-]
iAMkenough 4 hours ago [-]
Too many AI agents connecting at once?
nazgulsenpai 4 hours ago [-]
sam altman needs a big headline to shore up AI funding
millerm 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps they will attempt to "conscript" all of our RAM.
FranOntanaya 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sonicrocketman 5 hours ago [-]
Down detector shows like everything is down. AWS, Azure, Office, Gmail. Everything. https://downdetector.com
notatoad 4 hours ago [-]
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.
48 minutes ago [-]
cwillu 3 hours ago [-]
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
kube-system 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
hunter2_ 2 hours ago [-]
Especially when looking constitutes reporting (Schrödinger's downdetector?) and people look at everything after showing up for one thing.
midas89 3 hours ago [-]
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.
jwnin 27 minutes ago [-]
Entra is not impacted, SSO is working for non-M365 apps.
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.
Khaine 9 minutes ago [-]
The new version which is a skinned web browser is terrible
abirch 2 hours ago [-]
If you could create a real world Outlook, it'd become the new Office Space fax machine.
function_seven 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ratelimitsteve 4 hours ago [-]
Teams: Either It's Working, Or You Are
marcosdumay 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hinkley 4 hours ago [-]
Remember when Teams ate cellphone batteries like candy? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
com2kid 3 hours ago [-]
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. :)
tsherb 4 hours ago [-]
Right - don't get too ambitious! :D
peanut-walrus 3 hours ago [-]
Downdetector does not measure service availability. It's more of a vibes thing.
5 hours ago [-]
game_the0ry 2 hours ago [-]
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.
RajT88 2 hours ago [-]
ThousandEyes while it was loading seemed to have centralized around it mostly being a Microsoft outage.
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.
Downdetector's methodology is pretty garbage. I'm always surprised to see techies referencing them.
sonicrocketman 4 hours ago [-]
It's something to reference. My view is that it's better than "doesn't load for me".
inChargeOfIT 4 hours ago [-]
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.
cush 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, but the methodology means that normies are going to inaccurately blame AWS and Google (both are down right now according to downdetector)
OGWhales 2 hours ago [-]
At least it reports the numbers they are getting, you can see that outlook has 130k reports while AWS only has 1.3k.
marifjeren 4 hours ago [-]
What's your preferred alternative?
tristor 4 hours ago [-]
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.
MadrasTh0rn 3 hours ago [-]
Thank you for the recommendation!
They indicate sharepoint is getting blown out... again.
janlukacs 2 hours ago [-]
still down :)
VCFundedGenYer 1 hours ago [-]
Honestly I trust downdetector more than that. Crowdsourcing always wins.
justusthane 3 hours ago [-]
It is ironic that this outage map _also_ is not loading for me right now
tristor 3 hours ago [-]
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.
xtiansimon 2 hours ago [-]
LOL. Share defaults to X.com
stronglikedan 1 hours ago [-]
seems smart to link to the most popular platform by default. there's other share links at the bottom for the less popular ones
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ishtanbul 3 hours ago [-]
it seems to be down... lol
andrewinardeer 4 hours ago [-]
Ping?
dymk 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently Outlook, Gmail, etc are all working on the server at 192.168.1.1 then - ping says it's responding just fine
Icathian 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
Back in the golden days you could just go to search.twitter.com, search "AWS", and sort by recent.
No. It requires an account now, and they did away with the recent posts firehose.
krazydad 4 hours ago [-]
"Start Free Trial" -- uh, no thanks. You seem skeptical of crowd sourcing. Enjoy your Encyclopedia Brittanica.
spelunker 1 hours ago [-]
My extensive DDoS bot network... er I mean my distributed website validation platform!
2 hours ago [-]
akersten 4 hours ago [-]
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.
rdiddly 2 hours ago [-]
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!
denysvitali 2 hours ago [-]
Still more reliable than most of the status pages that even lie after the outages
pigggg 3 hours ago [-]
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.
greenchair 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dudus 4 hours ago [-]
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.
busymom0 4 hours ago [-]
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..
MiguelPablo 3 hours ago [-]
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".
paxy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
patrickmay 4 hours ago [-]
"There's nothing wrong with . . . Facebook."
That's a bold claim to make on HN.
SomeonesAccount 5 hours ago [-]
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"
matt3210 4 hours ago [-]
Software / software service quality has been declining for a few years IMO.
TacticalCoder 3 hours ago [-]
> ... 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.
perching_aix 2 hours ago [-]
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.
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
10111001 2 hours ago [-]
> Using LLMs properly leads to better software, not just more of it.
Current industry best practice is to use LLMs improperly.
hackerbrother 2 hours ago [-]
How do you use LLMs properly?
NichoPaolucci 1 hours ago [-]
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.
CamperBob2 2 hours ago [-]
Hopefully the people who feel that way are already close to retirement, so the choice won't have to be made for them.
skeaker 34 minutes ago [-]
Well no, Windows has been more or less all downhill since Vista.
vconnor 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ocdtrekkie 4 hours ago [-]
This usually isn't a software quality issue, it's overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment causing additional systems to fall over.
worik 4 hours ago [-]
> This usually isn't a software quality issue... overcomplicated infrastructure failures cascading through a complex environment
That is a software issue.
cheesemonk66 4 hours ago [-]
Basically the number one issue these days
unethical_ban 3 hours ago [-]
I don't consider fat-fingering a BGP route or a DNS entry to be a "software" issue directly.
elxr 3 hours ago [-]
Infra is >90% software nowadays
iAMkenough 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Assuming AI agents are not the cause of the incident.
bitteralmond 3 hours ago [-]
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
davidee 3 hours ago [-]
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.
MiguelPablo 3 hours ago [-]
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.
worik 4 hours ago [-]
Coincidentally with massive programmer layoffs?
combobyte 3 hours ago [-]
I blame bad vibes
infn8loop 2 hours ago [-]
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.
antx 2 hours ago [-]
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.
stackghost 2 hours ago [-]
Are you finding these vulns with Mythos/Daybreak or some other tool? Chinese models perhaps?
> 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.
ArcHound 1 hours ago [-]
The status page reports that defender, DLP and others are now affected. This could get really ugly really fast.
xtiansimon 2 hours ago [-]
WOO-HOO! I'm going home.
andrewinardeer 3 hours ago [-]
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?
JPascal_ 3 hours ago [-]
In my language many would say “descansito” :)
rossdavidh 2 hours ago [-]
I need to start working on adding this word to English...
tech_ken 2 hours ago [-]
Oh estoy haciendolo
thraway2079081 3 hours ago [-]
Neither email nor Teams is working at my non-tech megacorp employer. Wonder how much of the economy this is impacting.
hdgvhicv 3 hours ago [-]
Productivity up 20%
stanac 3 hours ago [-]
Focus time, and this time you don't even have to (nor you can) reserve time-slot in the calendar.
morkalork 2 hours ago [-]
My PRs need approval but I have no way to ping anyone (screams internally)
croes 3 hours ago [-]
Is Excel down too?
chromatin 2 hours ago [-]
license servers are down, so we can't use even the desktop products at our large enterprise
croes 2 hours ago [-]
Then it’s a huge impact on economy
bharathreddy497 38 minutes ago [-]
This should have done long back. Evertime I use excel I just cant control my anger.
duxup 5 hours ago [-]
Same for me. Status won’t load even.
Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…
infamouscow 1 hours ago [-]
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.
NichoPaolucci 4 hours ago [-]
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)
> 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.
maxboone 4 hours ago [-]
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?
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
NotMichaelBay 4 hours ago [-]
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).
ifwinterco 4 hours ago [-]
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)
StableAlkyne 4 hours ago [-]
Voluntary reductions do not have the same reporting requirements or protections that actual layoffs have.
gmane 4 hours ago [-]
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.
evenhash 2 hours ago [-]
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.
coredog64 4 hours ago [-]
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.
4 hours ago [-]
rustystump 3 hours ago [-]
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
4 hours ago [-]
NichoPaolucci 4 hours ago [-]
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.
AnimalMuppet 4 hours ago [-]
Hmm. More than normal?
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
esseph 2 hours ago [-]
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.
asdff 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nightski 3 hours ago [-]
The CFO said in an interview they only expected 3% or less to actually take the offer.
hn_submit 3 hours ago [-]
I can't access my Outlook.com account so I guess Azure's having problems.
dastari 2 hours ago [-]
Relax. I'm sure they have copilot working on it.
3 hours ago [-]
trentor 2 hours ago [-]
I always wonder what would happen if 365 goes down for a week.
rwmj 1 hours ago [-]
Does anyone know if this is affecting DuckDuckGo? DDG is really slow and intermittent at the moment.
rurp 3 minutes ago [-]
Very possible, DDG is heavily reliant on the Bing API.
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).
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.
502
The service behind this page isn't responding to Azure Front Door.
nazgulsenpai 5 hours ago [-]
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.
moronicles 4 hours ago [-]
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.
EvanAnderson 4 hours ago [-]
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.
moronicles 4 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nazgulsenpai 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe not where you are but that's legitimately what our project managers were saying. We all knew better, of course.
anuptalwalkar 3 hours ago [-]
It looks much wider across aws, gcp? Whats going on?
rainee 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jobe777 1 hours ago [-]
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.
agumonkey 4 hours ago [-]
Anybody else was served raw text of source by default ? (gwire is down too)
2 hours ago [-]
neilsimp1 5 hours ago [-]
Down for our whole organization as well.
Aboutplants 5 hours ago [-]
Same here
SirFatty 4 hours ago [-]
Outlook is fine. Exchange is experiencing issues.
thesuitonym 2 hours ago [-]
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.
3 hours ago [-]
CerebralCerb 3 hours ago [-]
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.
A whole host of services are being effected. First glance, perhaps an AWS issue
inChargeOfIT 4 hours ago [-]
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.
z500 3 hours ago [-]
Outlook has been down for us for the last 2 hours
vdkyes 4 hours ago [-]
In cybersecurity we had black october, now we having black November it seems
nhhvhy 2 hours ago [-]
Eternal October, very nice.
fock 4 hours ago [-]
currently the people who brought us black october are starting it!
sgt 3 hours ago [-]
Also noticed the Partner center is down e.g for uploading apps to the Microsoft Store.
jenimac926 3 hours ago [-]
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
Maximilian_Bet 2 hours ago [-]
It is M365 having issues, not Azure cloud services.
kittiesunicorns 2 hours ago [-]
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."
To get AI prompts, i am using Bing. Bing still works!
rainee 1 hours ago [-]
Outlook calendar won't load?
LtdJorge 5 hours ago [-]
Our Outlook doesn't work either
bearjaws 4 hours ago [-]
Seems like URL scanning is down entirely and some intermittent failures in Sharepoint.
jobe777 1 hours ago [-]
RuskiNet Cve-2026-124194 hopped tio East U in Boydton VA zero day backdoor pro iranian
htrp 3 hours ago [-]
bgp misconfigured or AI agent issues?
apercu 2 hours ago [-]
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.
JPascal_ 4 hours ago [-]
Affected in Mexico also, Azure seems fine still.
tony69 4 hours ago [-]
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.
nxobject 3 hours ago [-]
GitHub Copilot strikes again, perhaps?
rolph 3 hours ago [-]
quite often, and after 10,000 such hours the expert amateur emerges.
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.
steve1977 3 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's exactly why it's stable?
aaron695 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
dbvn 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
isquaredr 2 hours ago [-]
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
Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.
flufluflufluffy 3 hours ago [-]
how have i never seen this it is brilliant
rconti 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dudus 3 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
GSuite was written from the start as an online collaborative platform.
O365 is Microsoft Office shoehorned into running in a web browser.
corvad 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure they got the memo to host the status page in separate infrastructure...
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago [-]
That would probably cost money or increase complexity, so I'm sure the idea was shot down.
tanseydavid 4 hours ago [-]
I heard they moved it over to GH Actions. </sarc>
at1as 2 hours ago [-]
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).
throwaway_1016 5 hours ago [-]
Ironically, this article is down as well.
geekamongus 4 hours ago [-]
I'm down with that.
jp191919 4 hours ago [-]
I'm so down
semiquaver 2 hours ago [-]
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…
flkiwi 4 hours ago [-]
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.
loloquwowndueo 4 hours ago [-]
Remember, my guys : “Microsoft Works” is an oxymoron.
thraway2079081 3 hours ago [-]
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.
friendlypenguin 4 hours ago [-]
No worries, the AI was installing an update...now it's looking for the issue, found Exchange and deleted it...
whatever1 2 hours ago [-]
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.
zmmmmm 2 hours ago [-]
Will be interesting to see if this gets attributed to AI in some way.
mattbrewsbytes 4 hours ago [-]
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.
bastien-brd 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe due to everyone pre-downloading GTA VI today ;-)
dbvn 4 hours ago [-]
who puts their status page on servers the status is supposed to be for?
JPascal_ 4 hours ago [-]
Fr lol
OhMeadhbh 4 hours ago [-]
microsoft, apparently.
OnceMoreUntoThe 4 hours ago [-]
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...
greatquux 4 hours ago [-]
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).
OnceMoreUntoThe 4 hours ago [-]
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.
arboles 3 hours ago [-]
Do e-mail messages that self-hosted Exchange receives always get proxied through the outlook.com cloud?
goodthink 4 hours ago [-]
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.
busymom0 4 hours ago [-]
Is that account AI?
gilfaethwy 4 hours ago [-]
Pangram says no.
Ungh 4 hours ago [-]
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 :)
caycep 3 hours ago [-]
Outlook is down AND Jensen is out? it's like some cosmic convergence
Caloric3002Swed 3 hours ago [-]
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.
fyrabanks 3 hours ago [-]
it's been down for over an hour globally
Caloric3002Swed 3 hours ago [-]
Yes? I know. I mean next workday for me :)
So in 10h
Now? I dont care Im logged off.
butz 3 hours ago [-]
Nice to see that intern finally learned not to push to prod on Friday.
tiahura 57 minutes ago [-]
Starting to look like something even Mythos can't troubleshoot.
robotnikman 4 hours ago [-]
No wonder my email is not working.
Foobar8568 4 hours ago [-]
But Linkedin is up! Yeah!
Surac 4 hours ago [-]
That are not the Druids your searching for...
Lynicis 3 hours ago [-]
i was gonna blame my isp but now i can see who bottlenecked my internet
The GPUs are having a moment of silence for their fallen leader
FranOntanaya 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe everything relied on an old server running a cronjob in Jensen's basement.
francisofascii 4 hours ago [-]
For anyone doubting Nvidia's close ties to Microsoft, here's your proof.
pona-a 3 hours ago [-]
[delayed]
4 hours ago [-]
utsavo_afk 3 hours ago [-]
email doesnt work
xyst 4 hours ago [-]
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.)
beowulfey 3 hours ago [-]
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.
hbcondo714 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
likelybot 4 hours ago [-]
LETS GO HELL YEAH
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
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.
azalemeth 3 hours ago [-]
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"
hdgvhicv 3 hours ago [-]
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
bawolff 2 hours ago [-]
Which is why service level agreements were invented.
antonvs 2 hours ago [-]
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.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
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.
datakan 2 hours ago [-]
It’s a shame we still use email in 2026
mrguyorama 2 hours ago [-]
Why
destitude 2 hours ago [-]
They then get you by spam filtering any emails not coming from the "industry leaders".
fock 3 hours ago [-]
their bosses decided for the cloud and they pretended not to care!
TaLiTr 3 hours ago [-]
If your system keeps people alive by relying on 100% Microsoft uptime, maybe they deserve some blame?
joseda-hg 3 hours ago [-]
They do government and medical infra, those systems should be resilient but...
LoganDark 3 hours ago [-]
Absolutely.
jjice 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Detrytus 3 hours ago [-]
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.
6031769 3 hours ago [-]
Github would like a word.
3 hours ago [-]
jmspamerton 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
cromka 4 hours ago [-]
Nice, so at least your messages sent to their SMTP servers will actually bounce instead of being silently dropped /s
bawolff 2 hours ago [-]
Normally if server down, smtp will wait a little while and try again.
OnceMoreUntoThe 4 hours ago [-]
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]
suzzer99 4 hours ago [-]
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.
hassnmauller 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ericfrederich 4 hours ago [-]
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)
nerdjon 3 hours ago [-]
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.
Juvination 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think this is the case, even a little bit.
ratelimitsteve 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ericfrederich 3 hours ago [-]
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.
zamadatix 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dorongrinstein 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
unethical_ban 4 hours ago [-]
Without digging into it, I don't understand how people can run "multi-cloud" while using the most valuable IaaS that each provider gives - serverless.
Maybe if people are spinning up simple VMs and VPCs they can manage multicloud through a hub, but if you're using the big three for what they're meant for, you're using cloud DBs, API gateways, lambdas, and whatnot. With how much tuning, billing monitoring and specific configuration is needed, it seems like that'd be a hard thing to abstract. Even using an abstraction like Terraform to try to keep out of the weeds takes a lot of work, from what I remember five years ago.
SoftTalker 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, and that's exactly why all the services offer more than simple VM/container hosting. They want you and push you to use all the other stuff that traps you within their moat. The last thing they want is for a competing service to be an easy substitute.
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.
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.
In retrospect, the cause and cure are obvious to everyone.
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.
Actual tech write-ups can come later.
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 not having significant downtime. we passed 99.99% hours ago, and we're on the way to 99.9%
Almost certainly not the fault of individual people, it's a management failure of course
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
we "bounce" the servers when on calls with customers.
Outlook just popped an authentication dialog on me, too! That's more than it has been doing since 1300 Eastern.
I wonder if MSFT's corporate email is hosted outside the environment in a more "on-prem" style environment (i.e. dedicated Exchange installs for MSFT's use separate from the commercial offering). I can't imagine anybody inside MSFT would speak-up about it right now, but it would be interesting to know if they're fighting this thing w/o being able to use email themselves.
"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...
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.
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
But maybe don't understand it because they didn't write it themselves?
2. Art imitates Life
3. Goto 1
https://youtu.be/3TNpOD6bov8
> 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.
One of GitHub's services will be down again by next week.
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.
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'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.
DDOS?
For Copilot.
This seems to be the smoking gnu, now what would it be ...
(I've recently been revisiting the X-Files. Can recommend.)
I saw a frog smoking on The Little Rascals once, but never a gnu.
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."
@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.
> 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.
Edit: Oh, there it is.
Any other service that interacts with Outlook in some way will create downstream effects in other services expecting Outlook to work normally.
If your org is using Intune or Defender EDR then you probably also are impacted.
Or, rather, it's acting like it usually does.
I just assumed it was Teams being Teams.
Back on Window Mobile 6.1.
Battery life usage quickly improved. :)
Lamest tech company imo. Why dont you lay off some more staff, Satya, maybe that will fix the problem.
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.
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.
They indicate sharepoint is getting blown out... again.
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.
No. It requires an account now, and they did away with the recent posts firehose.
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.
And with Google is people complaining Chrome doesn't load their "pages". I bet they mean outlook.
That's a bold claim to make on HN.
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.
It's been full speed downhill for many years, and the failure modes are pretty distinct.
Current industry best practice is to use LLMs improperly.
That doesn’t mean the code/result doesn’t still need to meet our engineering standards.
That is a software issue.
Service quality is in better hands after the layoffs, at least that’s what investors are led to believe.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
Personally I kinda enjoy these outages…
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-...)
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.
Or is this just a gesture of goodwill to avoid people jumping the ship on their own?
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
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)
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.
And everybody has spent a year letting AI write code. Correlation is not causation, but I wonder...
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
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
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.
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.
"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."
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.
I think it's safe to say, if the server is unresponsive, the change is not effective.
Hope this entertains you while we can't get to our emails.
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.
O365 is Microsoft Office shoehorned into running in a web browser.
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).
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.
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.
None of the admin ran shops are down 1 day per year.
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.
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...
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.
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 :)
So in 10h
Now? I dont care Im logged off.
- 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.
[1] https://github.com/customer-terms/github-online-services-sla
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.
When your outsourced system to Microsoft goes down every few months your boss can’t yell at you
Outsourcing is about shifting blame elsewhere
> 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.
451 4.3.2 Temporary server error. Please try again later ATTR2 [MI3PEPF00008486.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-12Txxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
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)
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.
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.
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.
Maybe if people are spinning up simple VMs and VPCs they can manage multicloud through a hub, but if you're using the big three for what they're meant for, you're using cloud DBs, API gateways, lambdas, and whatnot. With how much tuning, billing monitoring and specific configuration is needed, it seems like that'd be a hard thing to abstract. Even using an abstraction like Terraform to try to keep out of the weeds takes a lot of work, from what I remember five years ago.