Is this what it feels like to be old?
The Exchange code base frankly was a behemoth. No one had a full understanding of how it worked E2E. I am just sharing how I understood it. I was only a lowly L63 btw.
Oh, the memories. That login screen with the changing hieroglyphics [1] is forever burned into my mind.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20080220070921/http://lotusnotes...
lmao... but is it actually random or is it a hash of your password to make sure you typed it correctly?
I remember people phoning to say "I"ve sent you an email, press the manual refresh button to get it faster".
up to this day I ask if companies use Lotus and those who remember just shake their heads
If you want immediate response use IRC or actually phone someone.
Now it’s more like being subscribed and listening for events.
And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.
Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.
So when I read about Exchange Server to me it still feels quite modern.
The latter is probably the case for most enterprises.
Getting releases deployed into the testing environments, much less production, requires coordination, testing, reports and sign-offs.
Of course this can normally be expedited or bypassed for incident management and critical fixes.
"Microsoft Teams: Most of the core functionality including joining calls, meetings, group chats, and channel messages are not impacted. Scenarios that depend on Exchange Online, including Calendar related failures with scheduling, invites, viewing, and meeting edits. Creation of Live or Virtual events fail. Failures with Copilot responses for outlook, calendar, or M365 files, read history, or adding to new chats. Navigating to App chats, adding new contacts or syncing contacts in settings fail. Standard channels are working fine but users may experience the inability to create or delete private or shared channels."
After many enterprise customers refused to migrate Exchange Server SE exists since 2025 and will be supported until at least 2035.
Though given how the quality of their updates are going one could still say that it's "not supported", but at least they are charging money for it!
I must live in a bubble... the last time I heard of anyone using Outlook was when Scott McNealy was calling it LookOut! in the 90s.
In a ~35 year tech career I have never been exposed to, nor used Windows nor Outlook and have never met anyone who does. Who are these companies that still use it?
You have probably mostly worked for tech companies where business employees were not the primary workforce. When you think about it most other business generally have everyone needing a word, excel or PowerPoint. It bundles cleanly with the whole package.
I'm assuming your "surprise" isn't genuine.
Yes, then you probably at least work in a bubble.
In my experience, it's more common than GSuite in most companies outside of startups and big tech and is ubiquitous at schools, among many, many other entities.
The CTO had to pull a bunch of strings to let me run Linux.
I work at a fortune 500 company and they got me, 3 hours after I started working , the basic info about the obvious the internet is already screaming at you.
Since we are responsible for a large web application I tried to reach out to people through VIVA (yes, we only make use of that) and we managed only to reach about 2-3% of the user base. Information-wise it's like a blackout. For living in 2026 this is completely unacceptable.
That itself wouldn't be a problem - email is very decentralised.
The problem is that we thought that putting like 2 companies in charge of most email communication is a good idea.
Your email is down? Cool now you can’t log into anything.
If we were mainly using Teams or whatever other "better than email" service and that had an outage, we'd actually be in the dark!
As the resident complainer about Microsoft lock-in, I was honestly quite surprised by how well we could work around this. Don't get me wrong, if it was Entra that fell over, we'd be thoroughly fucked, but Exchange wasn't all that bad.
On-premises Exchange is still supported and licensed. It's a subscription instead of a perpetual license.
> I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
Exchange is a mature product (albeit not without its flaws). Its era of change between its 2007 and 2013 versions (inclusive). The 2016, 2019, and now Subscription Edition codebases were more of an evolution and has much less churn.
What this leaves is a comparison of whether on-premise exchange servers have been compromised or down compared to the cloud.
Exchange, in particular, is sort of "feature complete" to me. I'm happy w/ what it does and how it does it for the most part.
It's been a long time since I admin'd an Exchange server, but this still surprises me. But maybe it shouldn't surprise me since even Office is migrating completely online.
Pick. Up. The. God. Damed. Phone. And do your job.
Note that the infra for M365, Azure etc is different. They would be running on servers hosted in MSFT DCs but have completely different CI/CD pipelines. M365 services have their own deployment pipelines and it takes on the order of weeks to deploy your changes to production.
Considering the fact that Outlook is down, clearly email doesn’t seem to be working. So email uses something called Microsoft Exchange Server, there used to be an on-premises version of this but MS stopped supporting it to run the cloud version hereby called M365. Email is one big “macro-service”, if you’re running Windows Server, look at the process called “EdgeTransport.exe” this is responsible for sending/receiving email on Windows Servers. There are probably multiple 100s of services supported by 100s of teams that are run while email is routed from sender to receiver via MSFT Exchange servers. My recollection is that even if one of these services goes down or introduces latency in the pipeline, it caused a major incident. When I was working in M365 Security in 2024, this Exchange Server pipeline was called “legacy” because it’s one big .NET Framework service. I don’t know if they upgraded to .NET core but developing on this was as HN comments say, very janky.
The reason Teams doesn’t seem to be down is that Teams services are completely different and are written using .NET Core and have their own separate release pipeline. It was much easier to interact with Teams services. I actually worked closely with the team that was responsible for ingesting Teams messages to the customer’s data store. Their code base was much more modern and easy to understand. Exchange Server not so much.
I don’t know if what I said is accurate but know that Exchange server code was like a fossil that didn’t change as much, over the ~5 years I worked on it from 2019-2024.
Story time over.