

Microsoft online services hit by major failure - erinwatson
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14851455

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hopeless
This happened overnight, millions of user were affected and it's been on HN
for an hour... with only 1 comment prior to this one. I think that shows how
much business Microsoft get from this community!

Edit: though interesting to note it was a DNS problem again. More hackery?

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topbanana
No such thing as overnight surely?

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cbs
_Such a major problem is likely to raise questions about the reliability of
cloud computing versus local storage._

Is anyone surprised this happened? It doesn't actually raise any questions
about the reliability. Those answers were known when it was built. The first
rule of network programming: the network is unreliable. The real question is:
why do we keep playing along, blissfully ignoring that?

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boredguy8
Oh please: we don't play along blissfully ignoring that. Arguably the biggest
contribution to information theory is Shannon's source coding theorem, and we
haven't forgotten it.

For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is
much greater than a client computer. RAID is expensive. Backplanes fail.
Laptops fall. But now instead of waiting 2-4 hours for a reimage & file
transfer, I can take a base image, go to docs.google.com, and be up and
running in the time it takes to walk a laptop to my office. Or, if more
pressing: in the time it takes to log in at my coworker's machine.

So I'm curious: what's with the pseudo-FUD?

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cbs
>For day-to-day work, the redundancy & reliability of something Google Docs is
much greater than a client computer.

Of google docs, yes. Of always having a network connection to docs, no. Maybe
its just the environments I've been in, but at every client, employer, or
place I've visited, my devices were more reliable than the network connection.
Hell, last year the level 3 uplink for most of my state was out for a day.

In both cases you need a working computer to edit a file, but only one of them
also requires a network connection. The only advantages you have are that
software deploys faster because you're using a 21-centurly terminal emulator
and the file under work is stored on the network.

Just because we as developers haven't put the solutions to quick and easy
deployment of software packages and file redundancy into the hands of users
doesn't make the cloud a panacea. We have these tools for us already. If my
desktop fails, my latest-version files were on its hard drive, the network
drive and usb flash drive, all synced after every save. I can grab a laptop or
my co-workers machine and in the time it takes me to plug in a flash drive or
just hit up a lan repository I'll have the files as they were at time of
failure. If the other computer doesn't have the software, if I could hit up
google docs on the other machine, I can easily smack 1 command into the
terminal and in 30 seconds be ready to roll (and that server could be local,
too, not relying on internet uplink). I'm not against relying on the network
at all, but doing so in a manner that doesn't demand an always-on connection
to get work done.

A solution that relies on the availability of network _OR_ local machine and
can gracefully handle the fault of one or the other is orders of magnitude
more reliable than a solution that relies on _BOTH_ network and local machine.

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MatthewPhillips
Google Docs works offline now.

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chc
That just means that if you already had Google Docs open, you'll be able to
keep typing away and it'll commit the changes when it gets a network
connection again. It doesn't mean you can access your Google Docs (i.e. open
up Chrome and type "docs.google.com" and expect anything to happen) without a
network connection.

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MatthewPhillips
Yes, you can.

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chc
I just turned off my Wi-Fi and typed "docs.google.com" into the address bar —
Chrome says it can't find the site. So I, at least, _can't_. Based on the
Google blog post about offline Google docs, it looks like it's a lot more
complicated than that.

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MatthewPhillips
You have to turn it on. When online and in Docs, click on the gear thingy in
the top-right. There should have been an intro/help pop-up when you logged in
after they rolled out the feature, did for me.

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chc
Weird, I never got it, and I'm on Docs daily. Guess I'm just an outlier.
Thanks for setting me straight.

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brudgers
Context: Google has experienced difficulties. Such is the nature of the cloud.

[http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172614/google_...](http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/172614/google_outages_damage_cloud_credibility.html)

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cryptoz
Citing that article looks like you're grasping at straws trying to find
something wrong with Google. It's from two years ago and clearly specifies in
the opening that a small number of users were affected. Microsoft's services
went out for _everyone_ , and today.

If you're going to suggest Google has similar difficulties, you might be 100%
right, but you should point to a more relevant, recent article. A Mail system
going offline two years ago for a small number of users is very different.

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boredguy8
Docs has been down twice in the last two weeks during business hours. 9/7 it
was down for about an hour, and 8/26 the Docs listing was down for about two
hours (the listed time on the 26th is about an hour after we submitted the
issue).

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vailripper
Google docs might have not gone down for everyone, but when we used it, twice
we had instances where entire documents got nuked. Eventually two week old
backups were restored, which was essentially useless for the type of documents
they both were.

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puredemo
Sounds like their overall uptime is still several sigmas deep. Comparable, if
not higher than AWS even?

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sunchild
Where do you get that info from? Isn't it a little early to extrapolate long-
term uptime stats for a new service like O365? Maybe you were referring to the
cloud infrastructure only, and not the app layer?

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puredemo
The article contained some numbers. Approximately 4 hours of down time in a
year and a half.

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ditojim
is calling it "Office 36X" leaving enough room for all the major outages the
service will have in its first year?

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rhplus
Given that the mean length of a year is 365.2425 days, Office 365 only needs
to maintain 99.93% uptime to stay true to its name.

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egiva
Hotmail: gave it up years ago for GMail. Office 365 (online): tried it out but
never really got into it because I like GDocs a lot more. It's terrible that
Microsoft online services went down, but it's unfortunate that it takes bad
news to remind me that those services even exist.

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barista
Are you sure what you tried was O365? It's so much more than GDocs.

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51Cards
I have to admit I really like Office365's Excel implementation, it is superior
to GDocs Spreadsheet but the package as a whole is still not there...

Employees can edit GDocs on their tablets, Android Phones or iPhones with
native apps or in the browser. Off365 offers none of these in most cases,
requiring either a Win7 phone or a full PC browser client.

But the biggest kicker for for us is the ability to simultaneously edit word
processing documents. We use this as a white board functionality when working
through proposals either separately or on a conference call. Collaborative
editing is a very powerful thing and last I saw Off365 only supports it in
Excel.

I'm not saying that Microsoft isn't putting out a good product, just that they
are still way behind GDocs as far as ease of access and core group features
that they really need to step it up if they hope to grab back the mind share
for online office products.

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barista
That is probably because tablets only account for a fraction of usage. Besides
Microsoft does not have a good tablet story yet. With upcoming Windows 8,
hopefully they will get act together and improve touch based accessibility for
these products.

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calloc
I have a bad feeling that they won't improve with Windows 8. The issue at hand
is that Microsoft believes Windows 8 should be everything to everyone all at
once, and it simply can't. They need to realise that to "win" in the tablet
space they need to leave their love child Windows behind and build something
that was designed from the ground up for a small form factor tablet device.

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kooshball
have you seen the demos they shown so far? the metro view in tablet form can
be all you ever see. the legacy desktop code doesnt even get loaded. it's
similar to what apple did with mac osx and ios, except you have the option of
loading either of them.

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barista
I am keeping an eye on the upcoming Build conference. That should have more
details for sure.

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mattparcher
Does anyone have an opinion on the reliability of Microsoft’s hosted Exchange
services (or alternatives)? My boss would love to move his email into the
cloud, but we keep seeing stories like this…

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micampe
Nobody posts their in-house services failures on the web.

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cstefanovici
this messed up some stuff for us due to partial reliance on this at
www.spottmusic.com. had to work to repair the database this morning. not fun.

