alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours
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Apparently this single outage means Office 365 uptime this year drops to 3 nines (2 nines for this month). You can claim SLA credit worth 50% service fee by applying before December 31.
This is arguably one of the biggest outages in modern history. AWS region level outage was more visible, but email is a backbone of the modern world.
BBC is running live coverage of it at the level of government and ministers, feels surreal
How many Microsoft employees are working on this? It's concerning that one of the biggest, most valuable companies on the planet, that runs services internationally, can have one of its primary services have gone down for this long.
6 hours ago they seemed to not exactly understand what the problem was, and that was 6 hours into the outage.
This is concerning.
Might be a coordinated attack against the network providers that MS uses? MS: Our investigation determined that one of our network connections to a third-party ISP was not taking traffic. We've diverted traffic to alternate channels to expedite recovery. For more information please follow MO273940 in the admin center.
Other source: This is related to a BGP hijack of at least 87.128.0.0/10 belonging to Deutsche Telekom (AS3320) hijacked by AS212416 (Proximity, Bulgaria) passing through AS57344 (Telehouse EAD, Bulgaria) starting at 0633 UTC today.
Is for this reason that my email is hosted on a cheap VPS:
https://gioorgi.com/2020/mail-server-on-docker/ https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver
It is very easy to set up (just a bit of time on average every 6 month to follow upgrades) and work out of the box.
Europe outlook users are experiencing problems too.
I have always felt it's less about email redundancy and more about having a backup plan. If outlook goes down tomorrow, does everyone know how to keep work and client communication moving? that is something worth thinking about.
Good morning and happy Friday the 13th everyone
This is going to cause absolute chaos. Basically every government organisation and business in the UK runs on outlook. The whole day is going to be a write off. It’s like a bank holiday!
Having friends who work at Microsoft, this is not really surprising at all. The company has always had deep structural problems. The AI change has really just exposed it and is aggressively accelerating the inevitable implosion. It's truly in a free fall that is planned and orchestrated perfectly by their upper management. Their CEO and VPs are convinced you don't need engineering know-hows any more because of AI, and they got all the management layers to sincerely agree with them. Not in a malicious or subverting way, but in a "you can't get a man to understand something his salary depends on him not understanding it" way.
Microsoft has a moat, but their moat is having billions of dollars to spend on data centers. It's a failure everywhere else. It'll continue to rake in billions in revenue because people need compute now, but it's rotten at the top.
All 3 of my outlook accounts are still dead.
I am looking at other current events and beginning to wonder if there is some kind of correlation.
Yesterday I was attending an offline course that ended slightly before this outage started.
The final thing we did was photo a QR code with our phones that took us to an Office 365 form to evaluate the course.
I was surprised to see some fields on my form showing values that my course comrades had entered on their phone.
Could the course evaluation have been incorrectly developed and deployed using AI on Office365 by the course developer?
Or was some session state all messed up across parts of Office 365?
I was in a hurry so I decided to come back to check on this form later but now it is just stuck ”Loading…”.
https://thenational.co.za/news/2026-11-13-cisa-confirms-hack...
This is not related to this outage, right?
16 hours and nothing...
Given the great options nowadays it might be smarter to self host email.
See: Stalwart Mail Server: https://stalw.art/ Bulwark Webmail/Groupware: https://bulwarkmail.org/
Why would anyone introduce a single point of failure out of their control into their company?
We're doing anything to avoid single points of failure in our products, but our IT is doing the opposite.
What I hate most, is that fucking piece of shit teams was still working, so I had to take meetings and calls.
Microsoft imposes all of this shit on the world. Poorly thought out products, buggy crap. Its finally come home to roost.
Something I've been thinking about with the last few major outages is that as there is more and more consolidation (fewer large companies running a higher share of the world's infrastructure and critical services) is that we become increasingly exposed to massive disruption like this. Would some sort of mandated maximum occupancy per instance resolve this? So Outlook.com is allowed to support 100m accounts per instance. Then you are required to spin up Outlook2.com. You are not allowed to have any shared infrastructure. Yes it's wasteful and expensive, but these are companies with billions in revenue, so that's the price you pay. It just seems that keeping these huge, incredibly complex services running is turning in to an impossible task. Very much a hot take so interested in the opinions of peope who have worked at this scale.
Just got up, watched BBC on treadmill. Everyone talks about how this is a phenomina of modern life, that the only other option is paper. Microsoft is winning. People cannot envision an alternative. But outlook is not email. Just use someone else, anyone else.
My email is still working, has been solid for moe than a decade. My calander ap opened as normal this morning. My chat windows are all alive. My digital life is just normal today... with rather fewer emails in the inbox. DROP MIRCOSOFT. Pick up linux. Pay for a proper email service. There is a larger world out there!
..but why is it so centralized? It makes these events so final.
MY University's whole email system is Outlook/365, and that also seems kind of dumb to me.
They used AI to create something they didn't wholly understand to debug.
[dead]
"Okay? Nothing. It’s just terrible. Every day is a nightmare. As recently as 1972, most buildings collapsed and rusty nails were found in cereal boxes all the time. Okay, so when you’re faced with statistics like this, it’s very difficult to be optimistic. So, hey, why not think about the statistics? I want to just put that out of your mind."
https://www.centennialsoftwaresolutions.com/help/transcript-...
26 Oct: Microsoft offers voluntary buyouts to 60,000 employees as AI leads to efficiency push
It's just a wild theory, but maybe there are still too much employees left, standing in the way of AI? I would try firing another 60,000 first.
Who needs senior engineers. We are going to have LLMs troubleshoot billion-scale systems!
What could go wrong, said all of the hyperscalers. Enjoy your multi day downtimes.
It will be interesting to know if the loss of codebase understanding due to agentic coding is the primary cause for the slowness of their response.
If it is indeed the case, this might be the first clear "win" for those who have been warning about the dangers having blind faith in AI and of pushing poorly understood code into production.
> We're aggressively pursuing all pathways to reduce impact
I love this kind of wording. It makes everything suddenly more serious lol.
At least Microsoft 360 still has a nice sound to it.
No Outlook, they should make this a public holiday!
Raj and Pajeet are working on getting it back up
This is why one signs a contract with Microsoft: no-one gets fired when they have a twelve-hour outage. You sign a contract with some unknown company and have a six-hour email outage, you had better start packing up your things.
Nothing could go wrong if you force/bind millions or billions of people to a single point of failure. Of course, I doubt Microsoft ever will have to pay a single cent for lost work hours/ money across the globe. They probably have a fine print against that.
Hopefully some of their "customers" learn a lesson and switch to a software without this side effect in worst case. There's plenty of alternatives (LibreOffice, OpenOffice, etc.)
Bring back that guy that said "Developers, developers, developers..."
The repeated comments on their twitter feed are weird, is it an LLM writing it? why can't they just wait until its fully fixed?
I've heard enough, fire everyone
Ho-hum, my LibreOffice on my local machine hasn't skipped a beat all day!
Isn't there an old saying about putting all one's eggs into one basket?
From where I'm sitting, everything is working but Exchange Online which is absolutely fine by me.
I hope it was not caused by AI generated code
“Co-pilot, fix the outage. Make no mistakes.”
Just by looking at the O365 UI changes they have been doing tells me there’s a massive competency crisis within that team.
It would not surprise me if the entire project is complete and utter (human-written) slop
Token maxxing can't help huh ?
Funny, my self hosted email has a better uptime than this pos
Microsoft is unable to run a reliable hosted email service, given infinite resources. What people don't realise is that the former is in part a consequence of the latter. Without a forcing function, complexity multiplies, silent fragility accumulates, end-to-end understanding dwindles. There is no incentive to simplify.