I wonder whether this will help the already strengthening trend of some governments to unstick themselves from Microsoft (in particular their cloud).

I don't expect a fundamental shift but the boss having no access to his mails seems certainly like something I would bring up quite a bit.

I am certain this is the direction of thought at least for Europeans. IIRC France recently moved away from Microsoft. If right now they do not have this outage, I can only imagine how much it boosts confidence in such decisions

> I wonder whether this will help the already strengthening trend of some governments to unstick themselves from Microsoft (in particular their cloud).

It will help a bit, but it would need much more than 24h to have a real impact. If their service is still down in a week, now we're talking.

Now everyone's talking, because that will be the main option without email.

Felt bad for the engineers that it had to happen on a Friday but for a multi day outage I guess it's a blessing in disguise.

Barring corona & year end holidays, this is probably the closest we can get to a global work holiday.

Even consumer Outlook is down.

This means you cannot do anything that requires email auth (OTP, signup etc)

Email OTP is insecure anyway.

consumer outlook aka send your pw to M$ cloud outlook

it happened on Thursday afternoon US time

Call it a long weekend, then :-)

[delayed]

Who wants to bet that this is ultimately due to AI, either an action taken by AI or just general AI code rot coupled with developer knowledge decay?

Or layoffs attributed to AI?

Or ai-agent-assisted attack, possibly directly using the hijacked infrastructure for inference.

I would bet my lunch that the failing code is immediately attributable to AI, but the root cause is a failure of hiring, leadership, accountability, QA. If it was bad AI code, it was still deployed by a bad developer. The buck stops with us humans.

[delayed]

I know that we like to pretend otherwise but leadership are humans, too :-p

The problem is that AI can generate thousands lines of code....but I can read only few hundred a day with full focus.

It is much easier to read the code you wrote.

They are just vibing a fix for this right now... any minute now!

Yeah I mean a lot of people are nonchalant about it here, but email for business is like telephones. Basic infrastructure that has an assumed near-zero downtime and expectations of fault tolerance.

It's such bedrock infrastructure that I've seen it used as fallback in the event of electronic trading infrastructure outage, brokers would accept specifically formatted emails as orders.

At this point it would probably be less impact to have phones go out globally because people would fallback to walking across the floor, using zoom/slack for simultaneous communication or email for more async.

> ... but email is a backbone of the modern world

That's why most don't realize how big GMail is. Google has 1.8 billion GMail users, including a great many who are using their Google email professionally (no matter if it's a Google Workspace with their own domain or a redirection or just a plain GMail). Apple has 1 billion email users.

Microsoft 400 million and, granted, many businesses but it's not a fourth the number of email users GMail has.

And many, many, many people (real estate, delivery drivers, Uber and the likes) are using either Apple or GMail email from... Their phones.

It's a good thing it's only the "small" Microsoft email users base that is affected and not the 1.8 billion GMail users.