News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page. Parent comment

Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page by bigDinosaur on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:21AM (#50478686)
I can't think of any other engineering discipline where demand might increase by a factor of a million in a few seconds because some DNS record was propagated incorrectly or something - regulation won't magically solve the issues unique to software. Maybe it's doable with vastly increased costs (a classic would be running fully redundant 1:1 warm failovers, which nobody could economically do at the cloud provider level.)

That's not to excuse incompetence or whatever, just to note that the benefit of software is precisely how easy it is to change, which will always lead to more problems.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page by tarsierscripter on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:59AM (#50478936)
Electrical engineering of the power grid has the exact same failure mode: cascading failures of interconnected power grids can cause loads to increase by factor of a million in a few seconds.

I remember a power outage in 2003 that knocked out power for 55 million people and took over a week to restore in many places.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page by cowlevel on Friday November 13, 2026 @08:15AM (#50483082)
Also known as *the* blackout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003

Note that buggy software was a major contributing factor! The software was designed to, and would have, detected a deteriorating system an hour before anything broke, if not for a certain bug which caused the whole monitoring system to display stale data and then crash, including the redundant backup. This wasn't the only problem by far, but it was one layer of swiss cheese.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page by jimnotgym on Friday November 13, 2026 @06:23AM (#50481947)
Which is the kind of exceptionalism that really creates these problems. Software is the only industry that allows people untrained in running global infrastructure to run global infrastructure.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page by NetMageSCW on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:45PM (#50488706)
So why do other global systems have massive failures?
[ Parent | on HN ]