
Microsoft's TechNet is hilariously down - azinman2
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/
======
daniel-levin
There is nothing funny about a web service being down? Fuck. Everyone has
downtime sometimes. 100% uptime is a fairy tale. Billion dollar businesses
(like Microsoft) know this and try to hit lots of nines. This error is
probably stressing the fuck out of a bunch of people right now. Someone might
even lose their job. MS may have been hit by what in legal parlance is termed
"an act of God". Who knows?

~~~
dexterdog
What is not acceptable in my opinion is that with this post being an hour old
I am still seeing the site down. If anybody at Microsoft knows about this they
should at least have a valid splash page in place by now. Redirect the whole
domain to a static file somewhere if you have to.

It's only a blog so it's not really a big deal, but this is Microsoft. They
should be completely embarrassed to look like this.

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detaro
What's "hilarious" about a site being down?

~~~
blackboxlogic
They didn't use good, standard practices for handling the exception. It's an
example of them not taking their own advice. Advice I'm sure you could find on
the website, if it wasn't down.

~~~
nbevans
Some exceptions cannot be handled - that's what makes them exceptional. Other
than the page not being pretty it's not breaking any standard practices.

~~~
nasalgoat
I often here this but it seems disingenuous - something is printing an error
message, why could whatever that is not recover?

~~~
wyldfire
The error message could represent defective hardware. If we did our job right,
that's about all it would ever indicate. There's few sane actions one could
take in an exception handler to remediate the problem. I will agree that a
better overall system design could detect this problem and rotate the
defective nodes, though.

But in this case for all we know it could be a software defect from which
there is no recovery. IMO it's bad to overdesign recovery mechanisms that just
end up masking design errors. Clever staged rollouts of changes are good ways
to mitigate the impact of a new regression.

~~~
nasalgoat
Hardware failure is one thing but in my experience it's just devs not taking
the time to properly handle errors and exceptions. If something fails, restart
the process and report the error silently in a log, not facing the customer.

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tetrep
For when it's fixed, the error page occurring is the generic 500 error for
ISS: "Server Error in / Application."

screenshot: [http://imgur.com/L58Cip3](http://imgur.com/L58Cip3)

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arielm
It was inevitable :)

On a side note, as anyone who ran .NET/IIS in production knows, when the 500
page has an error (couldn't reach the session store, ran out of disk space,
etc.) this would be shown with no way to remove it.

It made for so many unpleasant Saturday evenings...

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SlavD
technically it's not technet but blogs.technet.microsoft.com -
technet.microsoft.com is still up.

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rottyguy
msoft is huge with tons of products. not surprising that something slipped by.
why this is frontpage material is another question (but not surprising since
people here seem to like it when msoft falls down).

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SlavD
I'm quite surprised it's still down - either they have no alerting on it at
all or something went horribly wrong and there's a team out there somewhere
frantically trying to bring it back...

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news_to_me
A lot of times MS will outsource these sites to vendors – I used to work for
one. For people who don't know what it's like, it's basically a MS project
manager making ridiculous demands on a very short time frame, which usually
leads to shoddy products being delivered.

I'm not surprised in the least.

------
wluu
Looks like just the blogs part of their site is down.
[https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/)
is up

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ericfang
it's still down at the moment

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partycoder
Just Microsoft being Microsoft.

It hasn't even been 1 week since the last major incident.

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Daviey
It almost looks like someone is trying to work out how to bring up a static
page..

    
    
      <!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->
    
      <configuration>
          <system.web>
              <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
          </system.web>
      </configuration>
    

To be fair to them... What would Stackoverflow admins do if their site went
down? TechNet is the ISS equivalent.

~~~
tmarman
They're not, that's a default message.

