Microsoft Outlook servers down, reports say

Office 364.93

Saw this in our all IT Teams chat today with people complaining. I just laughed and said oh well that's what you get when you moved from on prem to cloud. At least it was a Saturday, although I think that was by design since it appeared to be due to a change they implemented and reversed so that makes sense.
We recently had a huge outage almost a month ago with RingCentral as well. Our entire call center was down for almost 8 hours due to that crazy outage. I have been with this company 19 years and it was Avaya on prem and never had a single outage, last year we moved to RingCentral and boom less than a year later that happened. The funny thing is they also said they never had that happen that bad ever before either. Thankfully our VP has been around the block and knew to tell the company when we shifted to cloud that we needed to lower our expectations from what we previously had because there's no way you will have 100% uptime with a cloud solution. 8 hours was never expected, though, lol.
- I just laughed and said oh well that's what you get when you moved from on prem to cloud.
  Our Techs said that you couldn't buy on-perm exchange anymore. You needed to go with the cloud subscription, which "includes" all the crap you don't want: like Teams.
  Atleast, they said didn't make financial sense to pay for Google Workspace + Slack + Cloud Exchange, when MS offered their (lesser) services as a bundle (but the human suffering is real) :(

They should try migrating to the cloud.
- You guys I'm serious 99.999)99)999999998% uptime!
  Please sign this new TOS/EULA.

365's OWA, not Outlook. I assume desktop Outlook still works with their Exchange backend because it's just a redirect loop error. They should have it fixed pretty quick.
- Desktop Outlook stopped working too, it'd show a send/receive error or "disconnected". Seemed to be resolved around 3:36PM Central.
- 365’s OWA, not Outlook
  You don't need to split that hair. No one's gonna tell the two nearly-identically-named products apart later. While they intentionally named them nearly the same thing so consumers would get confused, I bet they didn't mean like this. But that's where we are.
  
  Outlook is a client, OWA is a web based version of that client. Microsoft is bad at names but I don't see a problem with these tbh

It's a shame the outage didn't take MSN down with it.

Nice, and this is just after Slack being down earlier this week. Good job cloud people...
- Era of clown computing.
  
  Looks like I need to change my "cloud to butt" extension to "cloud to clown."
  
  Got that from Jason Scott

Thus the weakness of 365. No online? No office.
I love the concept. I have for the past twenty five years, but for that same twenty five years we haven't been THERE yet no matter the screeching about 'boradband'
If we were Japan or Korea... Maybe? But give me local within my personal network if not that device any day.
- Microsoft would do _much better by offering a self-hosted enterprise model for businesses. They wouldn't have to run all this fucking cloud infrastructure, and they wouldn't be responsible for their cloud being down and stopping multi-billion dollar businesses from functioning.
  Business X can simply self-host their office suite and incorporate a VPN to allow tenants to connect to their sanitized local instance of office and access it through the browser. Realistically they're half way there. They already have the application designed. lol
  
  All because they want a 'you own nothing' business model.
  
  On the other hand, some businesses would rather offload the manpower, maintenance, and risk to a service provider instead of doing it on-prem by themselves. Really depends on the business though.
- Their desktop apps suck though. Opening two ecels requires a fucking IT qualification. As in IT had to change admin settings to allow it to happen in our company.

MS seems to have a lot of outages lately. Maybe they should put more of the IT budget in servers/staffing, and less in AI and Windows nonsense.

I guess that explains why the iOS Mail app asked me to sign into my Outlook.com account again. I switched away from the Outlook app last week and I was thinking the Mail app must only be able to stay logged in for a few days at a time.

Again? There was an outage just a week ago
- That makes it outlook 363 . So far.

I see a lot of comments in here against the cloud and saying that on-prem is better. My question is, why would on-prem uptime would be any better? Or is it more about a loss of control in moving to the cloud?
- On-prem allows you 100% control on the downtime. You build internal trust by deciding when to upgrade, availability of hot swap, rollback, etc.
  Cloud is just trust and it's out of your control if they break that trust.
  
  "Allows you to control the downtime"
  *unless your company infrastructure was designed by a 2 year old, you don't have infrastructure admins that believe is still the wild wild west, and your Security team knows how to manage it's av and doesn't block the file servers
- The problem with cloud services is that you put all your eggs in one basket. Even if outages are less frequent, impacting more people at a time isn't good. If most people use a handful of centralized services, those services become a larger target for hacking and DOS attacks.
  That's why I like on-prem, generally speaking. It localizes the risk and prevents a cascading effect.
  
  Theoretically the major cloud providers like MS have redundant geographically dispersed servers that mean there should only be an outage if the individual user can't reach the internet.
  In practise however those promises are hollow for a number of reasons, cost usually. Legal issues like GDPR also impinge (EU data being allowed to be in the US has been blocked by the courts the other day for example). In addition there's a long list of other configuration reasons which almost always come back to cost indirectly.
  Theoretically an ideally configured cloud solution is far superior to on-prem.
  In the real world, not so much: corners cut, pennies saved by non technical managers not understanding the ramifications of their choices & etc
  On prem is certainly better in the real world if you're big enough to afford proper redundancy and to hire and keep good techs.
  Many many firms can't tick those boxes though and so you get to imperfect world optimisation where what is good for coy. A is bad for coy. B

That might have been me.

Oh no

Nice.