# Microsoft outage gives customers a crash course in dependence on Redmond

- community: Technology (technology@lemmy.world)
- author: HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
- posted: 2026-11-14T09:42:18.885703Z (4h ago)
- score: 89 · 9 replies
- address: https://dboft.com/post/23196/microsoft-outage-gives-customers-a-crash-course-in-dependence-on
- link: https://www.theregister.com/saas/2026/11/13/microsoft-outage-gives-customers-a-crash-course-in-dependence-on-redmond/5309805

## Replies

- **melsaskca@lemmy.ca** · 6 pts · 1h: Who would have thought that the switch between the analog way of doing business with pen/paper/phone/filing cabinets would be the way cheaper and less intrusive method of doing business when compared to ideological tech. The local drug store who sold me my receipt book never once tried to persuade me to get a monthly subscription for anything, ever. I've come to the firm conclusion that I can easily go back to waiting 6-8 weeks for delivery.
- **mycodesucks@lemmy.world** · 36 pts · 3h: Don't worry, after MULTIPLE Azure meltdowns, Crowdstrike, DDoS attacks, DNS problems, certificate problems, and more, I'm sure THIS will be the one that gets people to deeply examine their relationship with technology.
  - **wltr@discuss.tchncs.de** · 10 pts · 2h: I’ve seen BBC covering this. I fucking yelled into my screen—
    
    In other words, that’s not going to change. Obviously, not a single word about ‘hey, Microsoft is incompetent’ but rather ‘oh silly we, the humanity is too dependent on tech!’
  - **bryndos@fedia.io** · 5 pts · 3h: These camels have double reinforced backs.
    And they already swapped knowledge of their business processes and control over critical data for a slightly cheaper (year 1) it contract.
    Stupid camels.
  - **FridaVanMercury@discuss.tchncs.de** · 3 pts · 3h: It certainly seems to get the most media attention of any of the previous outages that I can remember.
    - **dan@upvote.au** · 8 pts · 3h: It's because the outage went on for a very long time (over 24 hours to get Outlook operational again!) and more and more companies continue to migrate critical services to "the cloud" (someone else's computer) because Microsoft convinced company leadership that it's "more reliable" and that relying on a single vendor for everything is totally okay and can never go wrong.
      
      So many companies don't think about hot/warm spares or multi-vendor failover strategies any more because they outsource their thinking to Microsoft or Google. I've seen plenty of cases where companies were only able to recover from major issues because they had fully redundant backups or failovers at another vendor ([one example](https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-accidentally-nukes-customer-account-causes-two-weeks-of-downtime/) - in this case they did it right, with multi-region redundancy on Google Cloud in addition to full backups on AWS - so they were able to recover from Google accidentally deleting all their data) 
- **dan@upvote.au** · 10 pts · 3h: I suspect that institutional knowledge about dealing with Exchange's quirks is slowly going away as older employees move to other teams, companies, or retire, and are replaced with younger people who think they can solve everything using AI.
  
  Microsoft's been dealing with email for a very long time, starting with Microsoft Mail in 1988 then Exchange in 1996. Most of the newer features are just bolted on to the older systems. There's plenty of legacy cruft in Exchange server (similar to how Windows 11 still has bits from Windows 95 and even icons from Windows 3.0 in it) and that's the same codebase they still use for Microsoft 365 email. 
- **TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world** · 1 pts · 1h: What's this about a Microslop outage?
- **makeshift0546@lemmy.today** · -5 pts · 2h: Yeah I’m sure they’d be much more stable running their own. That always is cheap and has a ton of reliability. 
  
  Guys, it’s a few hours of free time. Daddy, chill.