alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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Crowdstrike crashed 8 million+ machines and broke many so bad they didn't fix on restart. Their stock is up 3x since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou... . I don't understand it but I also wouldn't bet on anything changing from this outage.
It's ironic that the Internet was designed to accommodate nuclear war and we still decided to consolidate so much critical infrastructure onto monoliths.
It should, but knowing UK gov they'll instead pay Accenture and IBM £10bn for a backup system that'll take 15 years and never get delivered.
I mean why is outlook even centralised? If a company has 600,000 employees, why don’t they get their own infrastructure? Why is it all dependent on central Microslop infrastructure in America
The reality for most companies, up until now at least, is that if they manage email servers themselves they will have more annualized downtime than if Microsoft does it. Of course if this outage lasts long enough (who knows what's going on over there), that will stop being true.
IMHO a bigger concern is that Russia hacked Microsoft in 2022 and China hacked Microsoft in 2023. Even that wasn't enough to scare companies off MS.
Basically, MS customers are locked in, the cost of migrating to anything else is huge, and there's a "no-one gets fired for buying MS" herd mentality, so MS has little to lose no matter how hard their product fails, just like Cloudstrike.
There's also the question of what alternative would really be better, or at least more reliable. My impression is that Google's infrastructure and engineering are genuinely better, but I'm recently ex-Google so take that with a grain of salt.