all 3!
Yes.
That’s why it’s taken over 12 hours now, no one’s left that knows without copilot’s help.
Lately it seems like more non-techies are souring on the company.
Top notch user experience peak was Windows XP and every subsequent release was massively larger, clunkier and slower while requiring way more resources, was spying on the users more and more. Office has similar story, peak of usability was maybe 2007 with ribbon introduction (which still a lot of power users hated with passion since it was far from clean design, more seemingly designed by committee of marketing guys).
which, besides hatred, manifests in malice, like Nightmare Eclipse. I wouldn't be surprised if this outage was an engineer leaving a parting gift, using a bug they probably knew of for years but management didn't allow them to fix.
We're... how many decades in? When I still did SRE work, I was pulled into no fewer than three dozen incidents because outsourced labor confused assets from TICKET-123 with those from TICKET-321. Target avoidance plays a part, and as layers are put on, mistakes become more likely. I guess it's a form of an XY problem, too.
Enterprises have been failed time and time again by poor MS products, but techies will steadfastly refuse to move off it, so the business has no option.
My suspicion is that lots of the companies are so attached to all the MS stuff (and that's what their staff know), that it would be an incredibly large lift for them to move off it.
Like, I'm at a very windows/azure focused shop now (for the first time in my career), and literally everything is already on MS, or moving towards MS.
There are some good reasons for that, and some bad reasons, but I suspect that most of the sales process happens at the executive level, rather than the technical level (and Excel runs the world, so why not let MS do everything else?).
One guy but it's Stephan T. Lavavej the guy who the "STL" was literally named after.
I work at a company with a few thousand employees in the Netherlands, and have been moved around a few teams in the last 7 years (not by choice, the team is nuked and I'm shuffled off elsewhere).
Technically, the product is supposed to have a "handover" to another team who can do the maintenance. What happens in practice is the person who worked on it gets saddled with maintaining it forever along with taking up the responsibilities of the newer work that comes along their way.
I've accumulated a string of such projects, including one that's used extensively by a few large companies, and the only person maintaining it is drumroll ... me, in whatever time I can spare for it.
Imagine if say BMW decided they don't want to manufacture their motors, suspensions, drivetrain etc. Outsourcing 100% of that knowledge to external suppliers, for all models, from now on forever. How do you think market would reacted to such move ie by valuation of stocks?
But the biggest fear is how is ai going to improve then ? We’ve seen it can’t feed itself on data it produced, the model quality decrease. But if there is no more human to produce ever better quality code because they rely on llm to generate code, we’re going to reach a wall.
Microsoft can't fix Outlook because they don't have Claude, and Anthropic's employees can't fix Claude because they can no longer log in without Outlook?
I started digging into the historical blog posts, GitHub comments, etc. and I realised everybody at MS who'd been working on them, SWEs, PMs, architects, etc. had either left the company, or moved to other teams. And the one constant about the internal moves was that people were now working in some "AI" related project or product. Literally, I didn't find a single person who wasn't now working on AI.
Clearly, there has been a huge internal push to get into AI. Resources have been reallocated, and anything non-AI related has been starved. And since working on an AI project is probably considered the only route to advancing your career, anybody with any ambition has moved to a team doing something AI-related. The result is that huge numbers of products and teams doing vital but non-AI related work have been hollowed out, and now we're seeing the consequences.
But no, read Hacker News or other niche places enough and eventually you realize a lot of the things we all know or use was a solo effort or a very small number of people, sometimes not even an assigned project but something they did on the side. Cue the xkcd about the lone open source project maintainer holding up the entire modern web but apply it to the tech giants and there you go, it happens there too.
Lots of its features - App Services, DNS, managed DB, Front Door, Blobs, Durable Functions, Service Bus, App Insights - are very powerful. The frontend portal is mostly fine for management. The Az CLI makes it easy to provision things quickly. Coupled with .NET Core on MacOS, I've not needed to touch Windows locally for years.
I could learn AWS or GCP, but that's just going to cost more time when I'd rather use what I already know to build more things. With Azure, I'd hate to see the rot set in further.
"When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout".
If you lose 90% of developers to AI, but everything breaks, how much money have you saved?
The underlying moral issue is that the management and money people have contempt for people who don't manage and don't have money, including both customers and enginers.
It's not just an inhumane system - although it is, that, brutally - but it's also technologically dysfunctional.
Sorry, had to.
6 hours ago they seemed to not exactly understand what the problem was, and that was 6 hours into the outage.
This is concerning.