alt Hacker NewsMicrosoft 365 outage leads to chlorine gas poisoning of 15 hotel guests
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I'm not even going to read the article. If your hotel depends on some cloud service to prevent chlorine gas poisoning you're doing something terribly wrong. Full stop. I don't know anything about the laws in Germany but this is dangerously close to libel in the US.
Disclaimer: I work in Azure, this is not a defense of the outage and I didn't read the submitted article.
I know it’s fun to blame Microsoft for things, but that is a poor and dangerous design.
Anything that could result in that sort of harm should have a more resilient and redundant architecture.
https://www1-wdr-de.translate.goog/nrw/rheinland/rhein-erft-...
> 15 guests injured at Phantasialand
> Due to the (Microsoft) disruption, no emails were received, as the company informed WDR on Saturday. As a result, no one was aware that the sauna area's maintenance safety system had already issued an email alert. This was because the automatic dosing system had pumped too much chlorine into the pool.
Chlorine gas is no joke. In high school I was making it by running electricity through salt water and then diffusing the gas through pool water to chlorinate my parents pool. My cousin took a whiff when I was distracted and had to go the emergency room for breathing problems. Fortunately he recovered fully.
Maybe the information is being lost in translation, but I'm trying to understand where the "chlorine gas" is being talked about. The articles I found just say "too much chlorine", which is hazardous but not the same as chlorine gas. Can anyone shed some light here?
Perhaps as a proximal cause, but not a root cause.
Anyone else notice that the date given by the hotel doesn't match the date of the Office 365 outage?
It appears that the hotel is trying to duck liability by latching onto the outage as the root cause even though this happened before the outage.
Core services must be as minimal and stable as possible, with safe fallbacks and never be part of a huge internet smart device big tech clusterfuck.
its interesting in the sense that emails have sort of become the de-facto standard for sending alerts and keeping paper trails. Even for systems like this. However, I agree with what other folks are saying in that email should never have been the ONLY way someone gets notified about an issue.
C'mon can we really blame Microsoft for this? This is stupid.
@ Risks Digest
Buncha Microsoft bootlickers in here.
Why does it matter that the service someone is paying for is an api or something else versus email? The email service failed. First and foremost Microsoft’s service failed. It doesn’t matter HOW it should be engineered.
Microsoft bullies enterprises into their products and targets tech workers who are against it. This is 100% Microsoft's fault and the amount of corporate goons on YCombinator is ridiculous. I don't think this will change at all when the designated response is gaslight and deny.
I'm not microsoft shill but that is such a lazy dogshit title for an article about what can easily be seen as dogshit hotel infra management.
Surprising this happened in Germany of all places; don't they have a huge emphasis on Linux and OSS?
Since this is Germany, of course there will be no learning because we can do no wrong!
Who needs a horn or a flashing light, when you can just send an email?
Yeah, and everyone who dies in a hurricane was killed by a particular pattern of wind
Sure, trust on a company that’s 10000% on AI, nothing bad will happen
I suppose if you really think about it, butterflies are responsible for everything.
I assume the backup pigeons didn't arrive in time either.
MICROSOFT TERMS OF SERVICE
Use of Microsoft products and services confer no warranties. Written explicit warranties are for entertainment purposes only. Use at your risk. Use of Microsoft products are dangerous to your mental and emotional health. If you experience thoughts of deep frustration, call 1-800-MSCares. All inquiries will be promptly processed in the order they will be received or when the sole contractor can get to it.
This time someone absolutely should be fired for buying Microsoft.
Employee finds pool water has dangerous amounts of chlorine, yet instead of locking the door to the pool they just send an email into the void?
BRB, off to read the Therac-25 paper for the third time this month.
Dumb as shit, sue the hotel
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> This was because the automatic dosing system had pumped too much chlorine into the pool.
What caused what? There is a story in Mahabharatha where Arjuna was claiming that he achieved killing of Karna. Krishna, the guide, enlightens him about the causal chains and shows how Arjuna' contribution was minimal.
For anyone that doesn't read the link they were hurt but seriously.
This was bad system design. Hopefully people learn that safety critical services can't rely on Microsoft which they also tell you not to do.
lol Germans and the internet. Of course it's the internet's fault, not theirs.
Hot take.
This is 100% fault of the hotel, not of Microsoft. It’s unacceptable that the communications regarding such a dangerous thing totally rely on email, without any backup or double check.