Crowdstrike crashed 8 million+ machines and broke many so bad they didn't fix on restart. Their stock is up 3x since then: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou... . I don't understand it but I also wouldn't bet on anything changing from this outage.

Yeah true. Only by heel dragging and refusing to roll it into our production stuff lead to us surviving that.

Businesses rationally won't switch because of one outage (even a bad one) because switching costs for a lot of places will be astronomical.

So again rationally this shouldn't affect the stock price much.

However repeated disruptive outages every few weeks/months (à la GitHub) is a different story, and there's also the invisible effect of businesses maybe being less likely to choose Microsoft in the future

Having an outage, fixing it, and then not having outages in the future, may be a positive signal compared to no outage ever, because you assume it will happen and the recovery time and process is unknown.

If the downtime persists for more than 72 hours some will switch as they need to conduct their business , whether its email/github etc. However as long as the outages are more like a snowday very few of the big orgs will have the inclination to get back into the business of self-hosting for accountability/price/biz inertia reasons.

A week long outage though , yeah at that point the decisions becomes a nobrainer and not even network effects will prevent the migration.

It should, but knowing UK gov they'll instead pay Accenture and IBM £10bn for a backup system that'll take 15 years and never get delivered.

Exacly, because 10B is big enough that everyone involved can get a bit of slice from it... Corruption is astronomical these days.

It's usually worse. They spend it in many £500k consultancy blocks asking how to fix something, get a report back, don't implement it and then the staff who were working on it get a position in another part of the government.

It's ironic that the Internet was designed to accommodate nuclear war and we still decided to consolidate so much critical infrastructure onto monoliths.

I mean why is outlook even centralised? If a company has 600,000 employees, why don’t they get their own infrastructure? Why is it all dependent on central Microslop infrastructure in America

That is exactly the question that needs asking and answering.

Because microsoft sort of pushes you into it.

It's a pain to administer.

Not nearly as much pain as those who stand to benefit from outsourcing mail services would like you to believe.

I have administered both Exim and Exchange and would very much like not to do so again. Especially since in the time since then the number of requirements for effective delivery and antispam has only gone up.

Paying employees -> bad. Paying corporations -> good.

A decentralized protocol, something like SMTP...

All good until you run it all in the same business :)

Rather smug with my separate SMTP/IMAP provider now.

The reality for most companies, up until now at least, is that if they manage email servers themselves they will have more annualized downtime than if Microsoft does it. Of course if this outage lasts long enough (who knows what's going on over there), that will stop being true.

IMHO a bigger concern is that Russia hacked Microsoft in 2022 and China hacked Microsoft in 2023. Even that wasn't enough to scare companies off MS.

Basically, MS customers are locked in, the cost of migrating to anything else is huge, and there's a "no-one gets fired for buying MS" herd mentality, so MS has little to lose no matter how hard their product fails, just like Cloudstrike.

There's also the question of what alternative would really be better, or at least more reliable. My impression is that Google's infrastructure and engineering are genuinely better, but I'm recently ex-Google so take that with a grain of salt.

That's really not true though. That's what the cloud companies told us.

We've had more downtime from all our SaaS and cloud services in the last year than the 20 years before when self hosting.

When we self hosted, we very rarely had an unplanned outage. It really shouldn’t happen all the time. Plus I could work planned outages around the company’s schedule.

Now it feels like something is always down.