

Major outage hits Microsoft Office 365 - evanw
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/outage-hits-microsoft-crm-online-office-365-customers/10359

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sunchild
Wasn't Office 365 released a few weeks ago? Not off to a good start. I feel
bad for corporate users who are stuck with that junk as their toolkit. I wish
this were enough to convince people that they don't need Word or Excel – they
just think they do. (They definitely don't need PowerPoint.)

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windsurfer
I guess it's now Office 364?

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rbanffy
IIRC, they had another outage a couple days back. It would be 363 now.

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superuser2
And Microsoft has proven to its customers that the Cloud is a toy and not
reliable enough for business-critical systems, so everything should return to
the (Mcrosoft-dominated and less competitive) status quo.

Maybe it's just accidental downtime. But Microsoft is not exactly competitive
in the cloud computing world (unless you need to run Windows apps) - I don't
think it's in their interests for this movement to succeed in the business
world.

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rbanffy
> I don't think it's in their interests for this movement to succeed in the
> business world.

I have to agree with you on that, but I don't think they would go that far to
tarnish the image of other cloud providers.

Right now, just about every other cloud service can offer better uptime
numbers than Microsoft.

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barista
citation needed.

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rbanffy
I have read two reports of major outages in the last month. The service hasn't
been online for much longer than that.

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j_col
Maybe someone left on auto-update and the server restarted after a hotfix?
(sorry, cheap shot I know)

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ditojim
just a friendly reminder that Google Apps had a 99.984% up-time last year.

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Silhouette
Please disclose your commercial interest if you're going to post such
"friendly reminders" in HN discussions. Thanks.

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dereg
_Dito provides Google Apps for Business™ deployment, change management,
integration, supporting services, and products to organizations of all sizes.
As a leading Google Apps Authorized Reseller and a Google Referred Training
Partner, we have the experience and expertise to handle your Google Apps
needs._

Friendly reminder indeed.

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ditojim
So I can't state facts about a product I believe in, without disclosing my
interests? I am not acting as a journalist, and I don't hide my affiliations.
I disagree that I need to put a disclaimer on every comment I make. the
information you quoted was very easy to find. You are the one being
unfriendly.

~~~
rbanffy
Microsoft fans (just like any other) consider any unfavorable comment about
any Microsoft product (or any favorable comment about any competitor) a
personal attack. Since the company is so huge, has so many products and
competes with so many companies, you have to either watch your words carefully
or stop caring for their hurt feelings.

~~~
Silhouette
I'm not a "Microsoft fan", I'm just not a "Google fan" either. As it happens,
I have clients who decided to use Google Docs in recent months, and I can
attest that while they may have had a server running 99.984% of the time, they
certainly did not have a useful, working service 99.984% of the time for us,
so I found the comment misleading.

Given that the person I replied to has recently made several short posts
containing obvious and often unsupported Google advocacy, I also found his
posts dubiously motivated. I'd prefer not to get into some extensive meta-
discussion here, I just don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour, and
apparently neither do several other people who have since upvoted my original
comment. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to posting more constructive
things instead...

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ditojim
Oh so your personal experience trumps Google's published uptime? Got it. My
bad. I am a Google "advocate" but I state facts. My affiliations don't matter.
Again, you are off base to suggest I disclose affiliations in comments on a
news aggregator site. That isn't even logical or reasonable. If I was a
blogger writing a story it would be a good idea to disclose things of this
nature, but I'm not blogging.

And you're the only one down voting my stuff..

~~~
Silhouette
> Oh so your personal experience trumps Google's published uptime?

If you'd like to give a rigorous definition of that "uptime" figure, I imagine
we could work out the probability of my experience on all those different
occasions, working with several different groups in several different places,
happening by chance despite the true uptime figure still being 99.984%.

Right now, it fails the credibility test. That uptime gives you about an hour
and a half of downtime per year on average. I don't think we managed a single
meeting in the past year without someone in the room having trouble using the
software in one way or another.

> And you're the only one down voting my stuff..

I didn't downvote you, I replied to you.

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rbanffy
> I don't think we managed a single meeting in the past year without someone
> in the room having trouble using the software in one way or another.

You must have another very serious problem. This doesn't look like any past
experience I heard of. I have been relying heavily on Google applications
since 2005 and, in those years, had only one minor glitch when setting up my
wife's company corporate mail - an account I couldn't create for some time.

~~~
Silhouette
> You must have another very serious problem.

That is possible, of course. However, I would point out that these meetings
were attended by a whole team of contractors, each with their own computers
configured with their own choice of OS and browser. Moreover, they were held
in a variety of different locations, and indeed across several different
locations at once via teleconference on some occasions. In other words, it
wasn't one very serious problem, it was probably a whole bunch of little
problems that caused specific features to be inaccessible to certain locations
or not to work properly on specific client platforms during a particular
period. (Before anyone jumps in, clearly everyone's Internet connections were
fine during the teleconferences, because we were using Internet-based
conference software to run them...)

My point is only that it's a bit rich to claim a 99.984% uptime based,
presumably, on having servers available, if the code that is running on those
servers isn't properly quality controlled so that customers can actually use
it to do real work. Just because most of the people on the team can connect
fine, it still screws up the meeting if a few others can't follow along. Just
because people looking at the spreadsheet in Firefox and Chrome can update it,
it doesn't help if the guys using IE can't see the changes.

~~~
rbanffy
To get to the 99.984% number, 160 people out of every million users would have
no access to the application on any given moment. The number doesn't look that
inflated. Most of the time, our (disclaimer: I _don't_ work for Google, but I
host a couple web apps) stuff just works.

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sciurus
This also affects Live@edu.

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avolcano
Yep. My college's email was out for two hours, and apparently University of
Georgia's is still out (or was as of an hour or so ago).

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powertower
Datacenter's network issue affecting a small number of customers.

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msredmond
Great comments under that article, too.

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sdizdar
At least somebody is using it.

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barista
Finally I got to hear about Office 365 being down. Was tired of hearing AWS
down, gmail down....

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rbanffy
They have been in operation for a month or so. Give them time. With two major
incidents reported since they started, they are certainly not wasting time.

