Global Microsoft Outage

Still ongoing, I haven't been able to access my personal outlook email for 12+ hours and as a result can't access my accounts that use email 2FA, including my virtual medical appointment!

Along with the daily Github outages recently, it's making me do an audit of my dependence on Microsoft.

I've had two ex-colleagues contact me this morning in UK government positions and tell me that they're still out of action with no plan B in place.

I hope this sort of stuff pushes us to a distributed model rather than a centralised mono-provider one.

It’s mental that the entire thing is centralised. Why don’t big clients have their own servers? They’re paying a fortune every year.

The fact that the government can get taken down by a central server is mental.

Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence?

In Canada and still cannot refresh my Outlook email. Not sure what’s going on but it seems to be really big. Is there any insider stories?

Also, while they claim it is not a cybersecurity attack (without saying how they know), these are exactly the kinds of things I would expect with the soon/maybenowww future of automated hacking agents wrecking world's cyber infrastructure. Right now, its embarrassing, when it happens to the banks, it will be something more than that.

We're seeing problems delivering to MS customers now. I'm not sure if it's they are full, busy, or perhaps rate-limiting to try and slow the deluge.

Last Error: 451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX3 NextHop: substrate-int.office.com. Last IP: [MI3PEPF00008491.eurprd03.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:15:37.721Z

Last Error: 421 4.3.2 The maximum number of concurrent server connections has exceeded a limit, closing transmission channel [MI3PEPF00008487.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com 2026-11-13T10:42:55.252Z ]

We're also seeing messages about alternate failover failing.

I remember there was a comment from a MSFT-er talking about how unreliable Azure is. Combined with AI coding, is the whole thing collapsing under its own complexity and weight?

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50471731

Why would any company as big as Microsoft choose to centralize software services so much that if something goes wrong, it effects everyone around the world?

I went to a bank branch here in India today, and apparently their entire email + a bunch of other services are down. This is one of India's biggest banks.

Second-order effects of this are immense.

How is this not a bigger news? It's been on and (mostly) off for 14 hours.

Unfortunally, this outage broke my entire work:

- No emails, calendar, file sharing, etc. - Claude Code broke as well because I cannot login back. - Multiple services I use with 365 are also broken.

Outlook is back for me. Just in time when my Claude session expired. I wish Claude would allow login with password.

Service is back in Japan if anyone wants to VPN and check their emails

With Europe now being fully woken up and still no emails working alongside Copilot this seems to be a rather more destructive issue then the last ones which mostly were solved at night and lasted ~8hours max in my memory.

We will also discuss and see how to failure proof our infrastructure against Microsoft outages. We made the mistake to base our VPN 2factor on Email. So now no VPN for anyone.

"The company said it had “observed marginal success” in fixing the problem."

Truly next-level corporate speak.

if this winds up publicized as update-related, i would question the operational decisions taking place within Microsoft.

first - were the updates fully tested in a legitimate test environment? (robust mirror with proper configuration and data) or were they "modeled" on a digital twin?

second - did any canary deployment precede the full rollout which seems to have a performance/capacity issue that borks (highly technical term) servers under load?

third - regardless of the answers for the first two, given their release quality history, should someone be suggesting "hey, this could be an impactful change, we should roll it during a quiet period like 2am Sunday" to mitigate customer impact and provide a longer restoration window option?

or has Microsoft simply asked OpenAI to manage it all...?

I guess some people who know how the system works decided to take that buyout package and Copilot is now in charge.

AI reducing productivity globally wasn't really the plan

Office 364, soon to be Office 363.

Microsoft decided to give a 1 day off globally to all Enterprise customers.

Thank you!

I think in the future, we need stable, minimal implementations of services: Minimal because a small attack surface is crucial in the age of AI and slop coding/attacks. Minimal also because core services, like the Unix philosophy, do one thing and do it well. We don't need big tech breaking core services by continuously pushing new 'features' (slop, surveillance-ware, ad trackers, etc.).

The future demands small, stable core services, and mail service should be a small core service commodity that has been defined and solved (protocol wise) a long time ago already - we only need to make it an accessible commodity for all without the big tech entanglement.

half our monitoring went dark for like an hour before anyone even noticed it was upstream not us

move to the cloud its always up, they said

What on earth was the cause? I couldn't get anything done all day today either.

The Agentic Era.

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