Re:Outlook is down, and so is Microsoft's status page
by xp84 on Friday November 13, 2026 @11:49AM
(#50486170)
Think about it in context. Polling constantly would consume a non-trivial amount of both bandwidth and server resources. 15 second intervals would require 60 times as many very expensive servers to handle a certain number of users as 15 minutes would.
And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.
Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.
And in the 1990s, people were just adopting email, and their existing context was mail that arrived daily. Other than IRC, nobody had ever experienced any instant instantaneous form of communication other than phone calls, so nobody really felt like they were missing anything if they didn’t get notified about an email for 15 minutes.
Today by contrast, I feel like 3/4 of the time I go into my email client it’s to get some login code sent by some stupid website, so from this perspective 15 minutes sounds like absolute torture.