Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours

Re:Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours by sobiolite on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:30AM (#50480701)

Not so long ago, I was assigned to a project that had to be built on Azure due to client requirements. Because we were underhanded and it was an MVP, we'd elected to use PaaS as much as possible: Postgres Flexible Server, Static Web Apps, Easy Auth, etc. On paper, these all looked fine. They had lots of documentation, example projects, GitHub repos, blogs, roadmaps, etc. Then we started building and running into issues, and we realised a bunch of these offerings were basically unmaintained. There were features that had been stuck in "preview" status for literally years. The blogs and roadmaps were no longer updated, and issues were piling up in GitHub.

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.

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Re:Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours by cryptonym on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:18AM (#50481192)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50250937

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Re:Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours by mrngld on Friday November 13, 2026 @08:26AM (#50483178)

That's related to something I realized which I think a lot of people might find amazing. They think of companies like Apple and Microsoft as trillion-dollar, globe-spanning companies, so it must be massive teams that work together on everything.

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.

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Re:Microsoft Outlook/365 still down after 12 hours by mjb8086 on Friday November 13, 2026 @08:56AM (#50483559)

This state of Azure saddens me. I learnt everything cloud with it. I've built many things (big and small) in it. It was the one part of Microsoft I thought they'd not neglect.

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.

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