alt Hacker NewsI’m extremely curious what actual veterans could even come up with to explain the situation as it currently appears.
I’ve seen the chats about cascading failures and it’s impossible to not expect AI is involved somehow (likely brain drain and what not), but what are the options?
It sure looks like “fired everyone who knew what they were doing” but I feel like at this point you’re breaking open the check book and calling them, and even if they did that I’m assuming this shouldn’t be a “normal” event?
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Bringing up clusters that are getting smashed the moment they’re online because of the backed up traffic?.. is it just exchange or AD failures behind it?.. could be quite complex with the traffic waiting
I can think of several scenarios that could explain the outage:
A bad antivirus pattern file can cause enormous CPU spikes. E.g.: a very inefficient regular expression with too much backtracking. This tends to get pushed out every few hours to every server, irrespective of role. Hence, "rolling back" the servers to a "known good image" doesn't help, because within a few minutes they get the pattern update anyway and die with CPU overload. (IIRC this type of issue caused a Cloudflare global outage recently, and is similar to what happened with Crowdstrike.)
Similarly, someone here mentioned a very recent OpenSSL security update that also caused enormously high CPU load. These critical patches have been rolled out very quickly with minimal testing because without it, systems are very vulnerable to nation-states utilising AIs to rapidly exploit new vulnerabilities. Microsoft (probably) doesn't use OpenSSL much, but if they do, it would be everywhere because its use in layer-7 load balancers tends to be "pervasive" and hence a sweeping update can absolutely trash performance of everything in the data centre. (However, this category of issue would have been fixed by rolling back the server images)
It could also have been a simple underlying initial cause, but then the "backlog" of emails that accumulated throghout the day would overwhelm systems that come back online, especially if they can't start them all at once... which they've said they're not doing. So, you start 10% of your capacity, which tries to process 10x the normal email volume => splat.
Most other explanations wouldn't account for the global outage.
>It sure looks like “fired everyone who knew what they were doing"
This has two assumptions:
1. people who knew what they were doing were all fired. maybe they just lost touch with the system reality and outsourced too much to the shaitan;
2. if the people were to be called back they can still understand what the system become after shaitan was let loose in it
I am extremely curious how any IT department in 2026, still justifies using Microsoft. There is a difference between being cheap and being reckless.
Speculation is a fun game, but from experience, large outages tend to hinge on complex technical details not visible to the general public and I've never once seen even veterans of consummate skill and knowledge correctly guess what happened in the headline-making outages I've been privy to.