Email has been quite robust over the past~ 30 years. Exchange is just email by Microsoft so of course it'll be more brittle.

> What is driving me nuts is that we still heavily rely on email.

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.

amin to that!

Yeah I don’t think anyone wanted that, we just ended up this way because it makes spam control more convenient. Without spam, email is incredibly simple to self-host. I suspect it may have ended up one of the most common services for companies to self-host.

What’s worse is how many things force an email second factor now. No choice to make a TOTP or to use a passkey (which, with biometrics securing it, is two friggin factors at once, and should be all we need for anything that isn’t nuclear secrets!!!! Sorry this just kills me with every SaaS product I have to “two-factor” to daily).

Your email is down? Cool now you can’t log into anything.

Meanwhile we were very happy that we mainly rely on email. We were still able to send out urgent messages (like "sorry if we don't reply, Microsoft is down, you can reach us by [phone] or [backup email]") via SMTP and if we really needed to receive some email, we'd be able to set up a secondary MX record to a holding server in about an hour.

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.