alt Hacker NewsHow 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.
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Let me put this way, the Visual C++ standard library has officially one FTE working on it, everything else are open source contributions.
WinUI 3.0, WinAppSDK, and related CsWinRT, C++/WinRT are in a ridiculous position six years after Project Reunion announcement, due to ever meagre resources.
XBox app keeps under delivering user experience, and bugs on patch Tuesdays are getting a joke by now.
All this in a four trillion valued company.
Mythical man month, maybe throwing everybody in the company at it isn't the right thing to do. But they must be in a panic, and their own communications internally may well be hampered, could be MS everything is out for MS as well as everybody else.
At least 1
In our field, once you understand what the problem is, the problem is usually solved. Unless it's broken hardware, obviously
The ones who actually knew how the system works were too expensive to retain, so now it's just some interns typing frantically into Claude Code.
/s Their internal AI is full steam on it. The issue is just that their internal AI infrastructure is down too, so AI just need to fix itself first. Then it will focus on fixing the issue. Oh, wait...
And which made a load of staff redundant in the last month.
This is HN. We should be asking why frontier models couldn't still dolve this! How many parallel agents does MS have working on this?
the vibe coding group in charge of this product has decided to delete the production database and backups
I don't understand why they haven't asked copilot to fix it yet, make no mistakes.
Maybe Nadella is still trying to figure out which of the 8000+ sacked employees knew how the system works /s
Not so long ago, I was assigned to a project that had to be built on Azure due to client requirements. Because we were underhanded and it was an MVP, we'd elected to use PaaS as much as possible: Postgres Flexible Server, Static Web Apps, Easy Auth, etc. On paper, these all looked fine. They had lots of documentation, example projects, GitHub repos, blogs, roadmaps, etc. Then we started building and running into issues, and we realised a bunch of these offerings were basically unmaintained. There were features that had been stuck in "preview" status for literally years. The blogs and roadmaps were no longer updated, and issues were piling up in GitHub.
I started digging into the historical blog posts, GitHub comments, etc. and I realised everybody at MS who'd been working on them, SWEs, PMs, architects, etc. had either left the company, or moved to other teams. And the one constant about the internal moves was that people were now working in some "AI" related project or product. Literally, I didn't find a single person who wasn't now working on AI.
Clearly, there has been a huge internal push to get into AI. Resources have been reallocated, and anything non-AI related has been starved. And since working on an AI project is probably considered the only route to advancing your career, anybody with any ambition has moved to a team doing something AI-related. The result is that huge numbers of products and teams doing vital but non-AI related work have been hollowed out, and now we're seeing the consequences.