mmoustafa 3 hours ago

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.

  • muppetman 2 hours ago

    Bizzare. My self hosted email, which everyone told me was stupid to host myself has been sending and receiving just fine.

    Of course I haven't received a single email because every important email is sent via Microsoft but I still feel superior because I'm not affected

    • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 1 hour ago

      Just don’t tell us how many nines you have, hey?

      • MrCzar 1 hour ago

        I mean, I can't speak for him but I also run a small server and I think I just beat MS365 in nines because of this outage.

      • sznio 1 hour ago

        infinitely many, so far...

      • Gud 1 hour ago

        It is not difficult to keep a mail server online.

        FreeBSD(ZFS+jails old but gold) + postfix + dovecot.

        • BSDobelix 1 hour ago

          Ha nearly the same setup here, FreeBSD/ZFS/opensmtp/dovecot/rspamd

          And yes uptime (with short outages(updates etc)) is not that important for a mail-server, since the sender re-transfers in intervals (mine is 5min the 8 then 15 then 60 then 180 then something up to 2days)

          So the uptime for the service is 100% (maybe 99.999) over the last 8 years.

        • newsclues 1 hour ago

          Mail servers are easy, getting the other mail servers (Microsoft,Gmail,etc) to play nice with yours is harder.

          • BSDobelix 50 minutes ago

            Not that hard, for example thats a good tester:

            https://mail-tester.com/

            and

            https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ (offline atm Azure??)

            • proton_9 35 minutes ago

              Getting a clean ip is hard. I have my personal email server setup and had to get it off of some black lists maintained by baracuda. Although i agree personal self hosted email is fairly straightforward and ideally more people should do it. Hetzner provides cheap and reliable vms.

              • BSDobelix 19 minutes ago

                >Hetzner provides cheap and reliable vms.

                True, i have some hetzner (not vm's but metal), and Vultr (just vm's), i just had one bad IP until now (i just changed it instead of trying to get it removed from a blacklist)

    • ozim 36 minutes ago

      Receiving is easy for personal mail I would say I receive 99% of the time.

      Sending out is harder but that 1% when I send something I need it delivered.

      Hosting e-mail for friends and family is harder and mostly what I would call stupid.

  • sekai 2 hours ago

    > 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!

    I guess software is still not solved, I'll let Dario know

  • Caloric3002Swed 1 hour ago

    You mean a Microsoft 365 account?

    Because "personal outlook" at https://outlook.live.com/mail has been working this whole time.

    Because I know people here are devs but you guys dont know IT lmao

    • MrCzar 1 hour ago

      It might work for you in your region. It is down in my region for some time.

      • Caloric3002Swed 1 hour ago

        Interesting because it was down here in Sweden.

        365 that is

        Peronal outlook has been fine

    • ricardobayes 1 hour ago

      This link is not loading up for me, and neither does outlook.office.com, it times out after a while.

  • busssard 1 hour ago

    its so funny, that service outages might help people get away from american hyperscalers.

    • pferde 1 hour ago

      Nothing will change. Nobody who is in a decisionmaking position will learn any lesson from this.

      • fancyfredbot 34 minutes ago

        If you take a big corp down for a day then decision makers definitely notice.

        I'd guess that almost every CEO affected asks themselves whether they should be so reliant on Microsoft.

        • robot_jesus 9 minutes ago

          Given that MSFT is down just 1.5% pre-market after what surely must be one of their biggest outages in the past decade, no one thinks much will come of this.

          1.5% is basically random intra-day fluctuations.

  • afavour 27 minutes ago

    Officially Microsoft 364

Ungh 3 hours ago

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.

  • RyanHamilton 3 hours ago

    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.

    • Ungh 3 hours ago

      Yeah true. Only by heel dragging and refusing to roll it into our production stuff lead to us surviving that.

    • ifwinterco 2 hours ago

      Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical.

      So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much.

      However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future

      • newsclues 58 minutes ago

        Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.

      • rzerowan 26 minutes ago

        If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc. However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.

        A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.

  • sobiolite 3 hours ago

    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.

    • Borg3 3 hours ago

      Exacly, because 10B is big enough that everyone involved can get a bit of slice from it... Corruption is astronomical these days.

    • Ungh 2 hours ago

      It's usually worse. They spend it in many £500k consultancy blocks asking how to fix something, get a report back, don't implement it and then the staff who were working on it get a position in another part of the government.

  • AdamN 3 hours ago

    It's ironic that the Internet was designed to accommodate nuclear war and we still decided to consolidate so much critical infrastructure onto monoliths.

  • MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago

    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

    • Ungh 2 hours ago

      That is exactly the question that needs asking and answering.

    • dijit 2 hours ago

      Because microsoft sort of pushes you into it.

    • pjc50 2 hours ago

      It's a pain to administer.

      • Leonard_of_Q 1 hour ago

        Not nearly as much pain as those who stand to benefit from outsourcing mail services would like you to believe.

        • pjc50 21 minutes ago

          I have administered both Exim and Exchange and would very much like not to do so again. Especially since in the time since then the number of requirements for effective delivery and antispam has only gone up.

      • TheOtherHobbes 58 minutes ago

        Paying employees -> bad. Paying corporations -> good.

  • gpvos 2 hours ago

    Maybe use a decentralized protocol, something like SMTP...

    • Ungh 2 hours ago

      All good until you run it all in the same business :)

      Rather smug with my separate SMTP/IMAP provider now. And hourly offline backups of the mailboxes.

  • roca 1 hour ago

    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.

    • Ungh 52 minutes ago

      That's really not true though. That's what the cloud companies told us.

      We've had more downtime from all our SaaS and cloud services in the last year than the 20 years before when self hosting.

      • doubled112 39 minutes ago

        When we self hosted, we very rarely had an unplanned outage. It really shouldn’t happen all the time. Plus I could work planned outages around the company’s schedule.

        Now it feels like something is always down.

MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago

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?

  • einsteinx2 2 hours ago

    > Is it some sort of spying thing? Incompetence

    It’s Microsoft we’re talking about so I feel like the latter is a given, and the former is a reasonable assumption.

    Jokes aside, it does seem that somehow these hyperscaler cloud providers who tout the reliability of their multiple zones and global distribution sure do seem to always have some central dependency or single point of failure. AWS for example seems to have a global outage once every year or two at this point, or like us-east-1 problems always seem to affect other zones too. You’d think with their scale these clouds would be completely decentralized and redundant but apparently not.

    • LoganDark 2 hours ago

      The problem with decentralized redundancy is that it requires separate update schedules and process controls. This directly conflicts with the desire for convenience in rolling out new updates and code changes, etc. so the single point of failure tends to be deploying new code to everywhere at once.

  • gpvos 2 hours ago

    Keeping your own server(s) up, including spam control, is work that takes time and costs money. Microsoft is probably still cheaper than that,[citation needed] and has more resources to keep everything running than even a medium-sized government. So it is understandable.

    • ricardobayes 1 hour ago

      Yes. M365 gives "free", secure emails in a scalable, hands-off way. The downside is it practically being a black box, making email issues undebuggable.

  • plqbfbv 2 hours ago

    It's been a while (~10y) since I administered windows servers, but I recall they were much harder to automate w.r.t. maintenance. So Microsoft created M365 to fill that niche and have organizations offload operational cost to them.

    With a linux fleet can run via SSH/ansible and you can patch thousands of machines programmatically in minutes and control the deploy at a fine level. With Microsoft/Windows it often involves/d logging in to the one AD server where everything runs, back it up via 3rd party software, apply the patches and hope it doesn't break, and if it does, call MS support, because rolling back is really your last resort (I feel it's become better since 10y ago, but I don't have hands-on experience anymore).

    Our company runs on-prem Exchange since 2019, and... well... it's a PITA to work with (Legacy Outlook/New Outlook), we downgraded from M365 and it was really a step down in terms of features and reliability. OTOH I guess it's keeping us afloat today when M365 is having a really bad day.

SubiculumCode 3 hours ago

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.

  • MisterMunchkin 2 hours ago

    Yeah it’s either a hack or someone slopcoded something that has broken the servers so badly that they can’t be restored.

    • ifwinterco 2 hours ago

      It's a huge distributed system, they're not hard to break in weird ways.

      Malice or gross incompetence isn't really required to break it, that's its natural state. You need high levels of competence to get it to work

  • OriginalPenguin 2 hours ago

    A successful cybersecurity attack on a major email provider like Outlook or Gmail is an attack on the banks. Access to a user's email account gives attackers most or perhaps all they need to access their bank accounts.

  • UqWBcuFx6NV4r 1 hour ago

    This take is bizarre and i’m really beginning to think that a scant few people are pushing it in bad faith in an attempt to spread rumours. It has no connection with reality. Extended downtime and faffing about with distributed systems issues all happen without it being caused by an attack.

Steve44 1 hour ago

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.

apt-apt-apt-apt 4 hours ago

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?

  • ceejayoz 48 minutes ago

    Azure is, ironically, mostly unaffected, and Microsoft's issues long predate AI coding, by like half a century almost.

butwhentho 2 hours ago

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.

SubiculumCode 3 hours ago

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?

  • graemep 3 hours ago

    If it goes wrong its bad for users.

    As long as it works its good for them.

  • lynndotpy 2 hours ago

    If everyone uses Microsoft and it goes down for Microsoft, nobody blames you, and you're at no disadvantage compared to them.

    Much of the productivity gain from this AI boom came from shuffling off the expensive emphasis on robustness and reliability, and this downtime is just one of the externalities of this increase in developer productivity.

    As evidenced by Crowdstrike stock quadrupling since it took down half the internet in 2024, vanishingly few people actually care about downtime like this.

    Meanwhile, there is decades-long familiarity with Microsoft's product offerings which makes for generational vendor lock in.

    I think this is just a new normal. Genuinely speaking, what percentage of businesses will de-Microsoft in the next year over this? I don't think it would even be 2%.

gquere 4 hours ago

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

  • LeoPanthera 3 hours ago

    It is literally at the top of the front page on all major news services.

    • psyonity 3 hours ago

      Except in The Netherlands, where we have some political trouble.

      Curious how such a worldwide issue can manifest, considering Microsoft usually has some pretty good geo availability mirroring?

      • dutchiesareok 2 hours ago

        Well, over here we vote each year for the next four years.

      • gpvos 2 hours ago

        Even Facebook took itself down with a single configuration change. Mistakes happen.

    • Steve44 3 hours ago

      Here in the UK it was on Radio 4 main news this morning and is the headline story for the online mainstream newspapers.

      It's also got two stories on the BBC Home Page, including one which is live reporting.

  • thibsrn 18 minutes ago

    It shouldn't be news in the first place, why do we all use such centralized systems where everything breaks down because of one bottleneck is the better question.

pathompong 2 hours ago

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

  • meerita 2 hours ago

    I am still broken with that, can't use outlook and claude code.

  • Reason077 1 hour ago

    Websites that don't support password (or passkey) login are infuriating. Sad to hear that Claude is one of them.

markus_zhang 1 hour ago

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?

meerita 2 hours ago

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.

zitro_nik 3 hours ago

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.

sammy2255 2 hours ago

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

  • TheOtherHobbes 53 minutes ago

    Tried this. Took a while to load, but it did work.

Sigmazero60 4 hours ago

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

mentalgear 2 hours ago

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.

  • simongray 2 hours ago

    We need decentralisation coupled with a reliance on shared protocols, like we used to have before platforms took over everything and anti-trust legislation became meaningless.

  • pjc50 2 hours ago

    The problem is that making a business out of "less" is hard. Especially when dealing with the hellscape that is "enterprise sales". Both the marketing people and the customer love piling on additional features!

    Two decades ago I was at a startup that moved from a Linux email solution to a Microsoft one. Why? For the CEO's blackberry and calendar integration.

    There are loads of FOSS email solutions and providers. There are fewer "email+calendar" providers, and there are even fewer "email+calendar+desktop logon SSO" providers.

    • kreyenborgi 1 hour ago

      And even fewer that let you see that visio presentation someone tried sharing with you over teams

beckford 21 minutes ago

Finally getting email that was queued up for the day. Then I searched for coverage of the news outage and was led to https://www.newsweek.com/microsofts-outage-cut-quarter-workf...:

> ...

> Newsweek contacted Microsoft for comment via email.

I hope that was biting sarcasm so that those of us who are getting up with restored emails can have something small to smile about.

rkrzr 3 hours ago

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

Truly next-level corporate speak.

joemamma777 3 hours ago

Office 364, soon to be Office 363.

rdtsc 3 hours ago

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

  • speg 1 hour ago

    In the hands of god!

subulaz 2 hours ago

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...?

small_model 2 hours ago

AI reducing productivity globally wasn't really the plan

throwaw12 3 hours ago

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

Thank you!

  • dingensundso 2 hours ago

    Damn. I should stop advocating for running important stuff on-prem. We should move all the things to azure!

diamondDrill 3 hours ago

move to the cloud its always up, they said

jdw64 3 hours ago

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

  • alfanick 21 minutes ago

    cool, more skiing for you!

raducu 44 minutes ago

I'm sure this has nothing to do with vibe coding, vibe devops or losing institutional knowledge thanks to AI /s